Annie John

Annie John is a novel by the Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, published in 1985 and narrated by a girl growing up on Antigua.

The chapters began as separate pieces in The New Yorker and were joined into a book by the single voice telling them, which is why the novel reads as a set of remembered scenes rather than one continuous story. Annie starts out worshipping her mother, follows her everywhere and is shocked to learn that she will one day live in a house of her own; by adolescence the two of them are fighting over how a young woman should behave, and Annie's intelligence and unhappiness push her further from the household. School takes her away from her closest friend Gwen, the colonial curriculum gives her a version of England that has little to do with the island, and the novel keeps track of the practical knowledge of the people around her, including the healers and the doctors, without settling which of them she believes. Kincaid writes in a plain, rhythmic first person, and much of the book's effect comes from what the narrator, even at the end, chooses not to explain. It ends with her leaving for nursing school in England.