A short novel which packs a lot of warmth, depth of understanding, a touch of humour and inner conflict, into its pages. Annie John is growing up on the island of Antigua - she is a good girl, an excellent student and has a loving family life but as adolescence comes upon her she finds it increasingly difficult to be the girl she thinks is expected of her. ( )

Annie John is a novel about a young girl growing to become a young woman. The story includes the deterioration of her relationship with her mother, her love for another girl named Gwen, and Annie John's depression. Colonization weighs over the story in the conflict between traditional ways and English culture. I don't know if this novel is autobiographical, but Kincaid writes with a sense of lived experience while also being timeless. ( )

Truly beautiful and so important. While I continue to think that Lucy is Jamaica Kincaid's masterwork, I loved Annie John as well. Annie John is of course her famous contribution to postcolonialism and the project of Caribbean literature. It is a coming of age story for a woman and for a cultural identity, buried in the story of a heartwrenching tale of generational shifts between mothers and daughters. Worth reading for everyone. ( )

6/2021. This is well written and the descriptions are interesting enough to be a 4* read, but unfortunately I didn't find the protagonist personally engaging.

When describing language, the author doesn't distinguish between the familiarity of Leeward Islands Creole and Standard English but she does mark out the protagonist's mother's "French patois" from Dominica. Both Jamaica Kincaid's non-fiction Talk Stories, which I read recently, and Annie John anticipate and revel in the potential anonymity of big city life compared to individual visibility on a small island. And in Annie John the surrounding sea is ever present. But I'll let the following quotes speak for the book.

Quotes

Swimming, or not: "My mother was a superior swimmer. When she plunged into the seawater, it was as if she had always lived there. She would go far out if it was safe to do so, and she could tell just by looking at the way the waves beat if it was safe to do so. She could tell if a shark was nearby, and she had never been stung by a jellyfish. I, on the other hand, could not swim at all. In fact, if I was in water up to my knees I was sure that I was drowning. My mother had tried everything to get me swimming, from using a coaxing method to just throwing me without a word into the water. Nothing worked. The only way I could go into the water was if I was on my mother’s back, my arms clasped tightly around her neck, and she would then swim around not too far from the shore. It was only then that I could forget how big the sea was, how far down the bottom could be, and how filled up it was with things that couldn’t understand a nice hallo. When we swam around in this way, I would think how much we were like the pictures of sea mammals I had seen, my mother and I, naked in the seawater, my mother sometimes singing to me a song in a French patois I did not yet understand, or sometimes not saying anything at all. I would place my ear against her neck, and it was as if I were listening to a giant shell, for all the sounds around me - the sea, the wind, the birds screeching - would seem as if they came from inside her, the way the sounds of the sea are in a seashell. Afterward, my mother would take me back to the shore, and I would lie there just beyond the farthest reach of a big wave and watch my mother as she swam and dove."

Abandoned lighthouse as panopticon: "The Red Girl and I walked to the top of the hill behind my house. At the top of the hill was an old lighthouse. It must have been a useful lighthouse at one time, but now it was just there for mothers to say to their children, “Don’t play at the lighthouse,” my own mother leading the chorus, I am sure. Whenever I did go to the lighthouse behind my mother’s back, I would have to gather up all my courage to go to the top, the height made me so dizzy. But now I marched boldly up behind the Red Girl as if at the top were my own room, with all my familiar comforts waiting for me. At the top, we stood on the balcony and looked out toward the sea. We could see some boats coming and going; we could see some children our own age coming home from games; we could see some sheep being driven home from pasture; we could see my father coming home from work." ( )

A slender, beautifully written, sense-tingling and heart-tugging portrait of a girl whose idyllic childhood transforms into an adolescence of pain and alienation as her relationship to her mother inexplicably alters. Very readable, very sad. ( )