Annie John (Jamaica Kincaid, 1985)

I've been doing a stealth read-though of the immense Novels for Students (NFS) series and this is the latest one, the second entry in volume 3. Personally this is book 24 on my way to 52, putting me an unprecedented two books ahead of schedule, something I fully plan to squander when I take on Neal Stephenson's Reamde in a few weeks.

Unlike the aforementioned 1000-page Stephenson tome, Annie John is a plucky 150 pages and is a spiritual sister of sorts to an earlier NFS entry, The House on Mango Street, both in length and topic. Mango was a little more poetic in style. Both are coming of age stories, and both introduce the readers to something that is different (Puerto Ricans in New York and growing up in Antigua, respectively), yet also exploring common truths across cultures (family ties).

Annie John may have rung a little hollow for me in that the mother-daughter bond is something I can observe but not experience. Books like these are important though for "outsiders" like me, though, because it reading a vivid account of it is about as close as I can get to experiencing it. Through others (wife, mother-in-law, sister, mother, grandmother) I have seen the mother-daughter relationship, with its stormy ups-and-downs, in action all around me, but as a son, my own connection to my mother is different. So on one hand I found it interesting to read about the moodiness of the mother-daughter relationship, but on the other I almost felt glad that I didn't have to grapple with such as ordeal. The father-son relationship, far more frequently written about in the history of literature, is plenty enough complicated.