Across From Lapeyrouse

Jeneva is growing into a startling beauty, but she's not your typical young girl; she's the youngest of the Savanoys, a high profile Trinidadian family. Her father is the chief of police; her mother: beautiful, talented, tormented and distant. Her protective older brother can't shield her from life's bruises if he can't deal with his own fears. And Jeneva herself is growing into a testing adulthood, full of uncertainty and sudden lust, shining moments and stifling tension.

Hers is a family with secrets, and they are not the only ones. Everyone wears masks as intriguing, as deceptive and as weighty as the elaborate masquerade costumes the Savanoy Carnival Group creates each year to compete in Trinidad's Dimanche Gras Competition. And as each secret is revealed, Jeneva faces difficult decisions, adventure, heart break and some seriously sizzling sex.
Author Nathalie Taghaboni deftly weaves the lives of her characters in and out of the pulsing Caribbean culture. The glorious street theatre that is Trinidad Carnival is a fitting backdrop for the drama that Jeneva seems to attract.

Colourful, passionate, catapulting constantly between Caribbean Carnival in Trinidad and Toronto and the serenity of Tobago, Across From Lapeyrouse follows a beautiful ingénue during a bitter-sweet coming of age. Through her eyes, we weep for first love lost; taste the ashes of personal catastrophe; brim over with an eager sexuality and witness a teenager growing into her own power as a woman tried by fire.