Annie John: A Novel | 
pickYet another book I would have never heard about if not for Litsy challenges! This short book has a lot to say about growing up, the expectations we put on kids, and mother/daughter relationships. Great read. #ReadingTheAmericas2023 #Antigua
pick#TitlesAndTunes #ReadingTheAmericas23 #Antigua This book was phenomenal 🙌🏻♥️My first time reading Jamaica Kincaid, I completely understand why she‘s an iconic Caribbean author. Her prose are lyrical and melodic, every word like an island breeze warm and rhythmic. A semi autobiographical coming of age story told in snapshots over the course of several years. The theme often repeated is the intense love/hate relationship between mother & daughter.
It‘s (almost) May 1 the start of #TitlesAndTunes #IslandVibes ☀️🏝️🍹Join us…Read a book for the monthly prompt (open to your own interpretation) & post a song that fits the prompt. At the end of the month we‘ll combine all the songs to create a Spotify playlist 🙌🏻💕We can‘t wait to see (& hear) all your awesome ideas😎 love Cindy and @BarbaraBB
It was SO hard to narrow just one song but luckily @LeeRHarry went with my Madonna choice 😉
pickA 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.
#Literature #LiteraryFiction #CaribbeanLit #CaribbeanAuthor #ComingOfAge
1. I read the tagged book on my last trip to Nevis. I wish Jamaica Kincaid was more widely read, she is a wonderful author!
2. We‘re out of the due diligence period in selling our house! 🎉🎉
3. Summertime by Will Smith 😄
#thoughtfulthursday
pickA gorgeous, spare telling of a young girl's fraught relationship with her mother and growing up in Antigua. Definitely recommend.
pickFinished this short book yesterday. Well written coming of age story set in Antigua where each chapter reads like a short story or vignette. It all centers around the titular character and her changing relationship with her mother. #scarathlon #teanslaughter #book has nothing to do with team theme - 1pt. @Clwojick @TheReadingMermaid
so-so(March 2019) Very interesting, lots of good symbolism but moves a little slow
pickI finished this short audiobook on my snowy drive home today after school was dismissed early. It doesn‘t have much plot, more vignettes of a girl‘s life growing up in Antigua, but it is beautifully written. I enjoyed the personal perspective of Annie and the view it gave of a culture with which I‘m unfamiliar. The narration was also wonderful.
#audiobook #Hoopla #1001books
Loving this first read of Jamaica Kincaid and Antiguan literature...
pickThis was one of the best coming of age stories/bildungsromans I‘ve ever read!! I can‘t believe I‘d never heard of it. I recommend it so much. Annie felt like an incredibly real person, everything was so meaningful but never pretentious, simply written with a gorgeous clear descriptive voice. I‘ll never forget her relationship with her mother, one of the best difficult mother daughter relationships I‘ve read. Why isn‘t this more famous???
Another random #1001books find!! I adore Bildungsromans with female protagonists. I don‘t know lots about it but it‘s a shortish story of a girl growing up in Antigua (I think Antigua?) and the writing is sparklingly good.
I just completed the last hour of Annie John. So, I guess this means I have officially completed my first book for the #25inFive. Bringing my total time to 2 hours and 11 minutes.
#audiobook
My next #audiobook. #currentlyreading
I did not want to go to England, I did not want to become a nurse, but I would have chosen going off to live in a cavern and keeping house for seven unruly men rather than go on with my life as it stood.
I lay on my pitch-pine bed, which, since I was sick, was made up with my Sunday sheets. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. I could hear the rain as it came down on the galvanized roof. The sound the rain made as it landed on the roof pressed me down in my bed, bolted me down, and I couldn't so much as lift my head if my life depended on it.
Christophane, pumpkin soup with droppers, fritters with antroba, pepperpot, cooked green bananas, breadfruit, dasheen, eddoes... Reading Annie John makes me want to prepare a Caribbean meal.
pickAnnie from ages 10 to 17, coming of age in an earlier era on a Caribbean island. This impressionistic, loosely autobiographical novel portrays the contradictory nature of adolescence. The strong mother-daughter relationship is particularly interesting, becoming fractured as Annie gets older. I also liked that there were no boys who caught her eye, only girls. Lyrical writing, strong characterization, and a vivid setting = totally my wheelhouse.
They actually practiced walking with their hips swinging from side to side. Before I got to see these girls close-up—when I was just observing them as they walked to and fro, going about their business—I envied the way the air seemed to part for them, freeing itself of any obstacle so that they wouldn't have to make an effort. Now I could see that the air just parted itself quickly so that it wouldn't have to bear their company for long.
One day I was throwing stones at a guava tree, trying to knock down a ripe guava, when the Red Girl came along & said, "Which one do you want?" After I pointed it out, she climbed up the tree, picked the one I wanted off its branch, climbed down, & presented it to me. How my eyes did widen & my mouth form an "o" at this. I had never seen a girl do this before. [...] Look at the way she climbed that tree: better than any boy.
Backyard reading.
When we went to market, if that day she wanted to buy some crabs she would inquire if they came from near Parham, and if the person said yes my mother did not buy the crabs. In Parham was the leper colony, and my mother was convinced that the crabs ate nothing but the food from the lepers' own plates. If we were then to eat the crabs, it wouldn't be long before we were lepers ourselves and living unhappily in the leper colony.
At school, almost everyone I knew had seen a dead person, and not a spirit of a dead person but a real dead person. The girl who sat at the desk next to mine suddenly stopped sucking her thumb because her mother had washed it in water in which a dead person had been given a bath.
pickThis was a series of stories as told by a young girl, then women, as she grows into adulthood.
Seems my current read fits this category. #ReadJanuary #Titlewithapropername
"It must've been a useful lighthouse at one time, but now it was just there for mothers to say to their children, 'Dom't play at the lighthouse. '"
"Since they were teachers, I was sure it wouldn't be long before, because of some misunderstanding, they would be thorns in my side."
