Book review & resources for teachers and students alike: Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (Vintage)

The author

Jamaica Kincaid (b. Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949 in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda) is an American novelist, gardener, and gardening writer. She lives with her family at North Bennington in the U.S. state of Vermont.

Early life

Kincaid lived with her mother and stepfather, a carpenter, until 1965. In Antigua, she completed her secondary education under the British system, due to Antigua's status as a British colony until 1967.

She moved to New York at the age of 16 to work for a family as an au pair. She worked as a fact checker at Forbes magazine where she became close friends with Marsha Daniel of Raleigh, North Carolina who was working at Forbes as a reporter and her husband, the author, magazine publisher, and professor Myles Ludwig, who was then the editorial director of Art Direction magazine and later the creative director at Penthouse and Viva magazines, and Peter Ainsley who was the music critic for Women's Wear Daily and later worked as a writer for Time magazine. They spent a great deal of time together. Ludwig, Daniel, Richardson and Ainslie spent many weekends in the early 70s with Christopher Tree. Tree was a California hippie who played a variety of musical instruments in a performance act called Spontaneous Sound. Tree was living in a small house in New Paltz, New York with his then girlfriend on a non-working farm owned by an advertising executive. After Richardson had returned to university, she wrote to Ludwig asking for a job and he hired her to work at Art Direction. She went on to study photography at the New School for Social Research. She attended Franconia College in New Hampshire for a year and later worked at the New Yorker magazine.

Writing career

In 1973, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid because her family disapproved of her writing.

Her first writing experience involved a series of articles for Ingenue magazine.

She worked for The New Yorker as a staff writer until 1995.

Her novel Lucy (1990) is an imaginative account of her experience of coming into adulthood in a foreign country, and continues the narrative of her personal history begun in the novel Annie John (1985). Other novels, such as The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) explore issues of colonialism and much of the anger associated with it. This text is a unique departure for Kincaid because of the way it crosses genres.

She has also published a collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), a collection of essays, A Small Place and more.

She is a visiting professor and teaches creative writing at Harvard University. She received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Wesleyan University during its 176th Commencement Exercises in 2008.

"I'm someone who writes to save her life," Kincaid says, "I mean, I can't imagine what I would do if I didn't write. I would be dead or I would be in jail because -- what else could I do? I can't really do anything but write. All the things that were available to someone in my position involved being a subject person. And I'm very bad at being a subject person."

My review

A great Bildungsroman, which allows us to get acquainted with a place most of us do not know, The West Indies, with its traditions, way of life, ancestral beliefs. It is also the story of a very strong relationship between a young girl (only child) and her mother, whom she worships until she.... comes of age and starts being harder to please and more objective. The writing is exquisite and allows us to focus on the protagonist/narrator's feelings, on her story.
A great read for adults and teenagers alike.

To dig deeper  - a few websites for teachers & students (or literature lovers) 

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