Annie John

148 sidor

På English

Publicerades 5 oktober 1985 av Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-10521-1
Kopierade ISBN!
OCLC-nummer:
11550274

Visa i OpenLibrary

Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensibility from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality. Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River.

18 utgåvor

None

It's a short novel - I burn through it in less than three hours - but there's hardly a wasted word. I find myself thinking the word "proto-Ferrantian" at some points while the language more evokes a less verbose GGM, which probably says more about my reading habits than about Kincaid's writing, but there you have it. A young girl's coming-of-age story that doesn't dip into clichés or gets sidetracked, but sticks to the shifting bonds between mother and daughter, between childhood friends, between what you thought you understood at 10 and what you cannot voice at 18, building to a quiet finale that's all the more heartbreaking because it doesn't offer any simple resolutions. My first Kincaid, probably not my last.

Ämnen

  • Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
  • Teenage girls -- Fiction
  • Antigua -- Fiction