Annie John is a coming-of-age novella; it tells the story of its narrator’s childhood and adolescence on the island of Antigua, from when she’s ten up to the point where she leaves for England at age seventeen. The changing nature of her relationship to her mother, as she grows older, is a big part of the book: Annie talks about her bewilderment at the shift she feels from childhood, when she felt she was unquestioningly adored, doted on, and cared for, to later, when she feels judged, ignored, and betrayed.
For the first half of the book I didn’t feel entirely engaged with Annie or her story, though there were details I appreciated; the book’s second half felt much more immediate and engrossing to me, maybe because Annie is older and the events she’s narrating are closer to her in time. Annie is a somewhat prickly child: in the first chapter she talks about going to funerals of people she doesn’t know, without telling her parents; she has close friendships with a few other girls, but as she grows older she seems distant from everyone; she’s very smart and does well at school, but she’s also rebellious.
The way Kincaid writes about Annie’s unhappiness when she’s a teenager, which is followed by a mysterious illness, is really vivid and excellent. “In the year I turned fifteen,” Annie says, “I felt more unhappy than I had ever imagined anyone could be” (85). She then goes on to describe it like this: “It must have come on me like mist: first, I was in just a little mist and could still see everything around me, though not so clearly; then I was completely covered up and could not see even my own hand stretched out in front of me” (86). A bit later, she talks about the strangeness of her own reflection in shop windows, amidst all the ordinary things: “I saw myself just hanging there among bolts of cloth, among Sunday hats and shoes, among men’s and women’s undergarments, among pots and pans, among brooms and household soap, among notebooks and pens and ink, among medicines for curing headache and medicines for curing colds” (94). The final chapter, which takes place on Annie’s last day in Antigua, is also really great: I love the way that Annie narrates all the little childhood moments and incidents she remembers as she walks from her home to the jetty from which she’ll board a launch that will take her to a ship that will take her away from everything she’s known up until now.
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