The reader quickly has the sense that her mother's standards of doing everything according to plan have created in Annie a felt but not quite articulated aesthetic - different from her mother's but equally powerful - and that this difference in taste is added to the other, more common rivalries of mothers and adolescent daughters. She is full of appetites and hates to be crossed. Her style is precise, ironic and evocative - Annie's world is full of people and places that intrigue her, draw her, or alienate her. Kincaid's only apparent subject is the evolution of Annie's emotional state as she is growing up. But her education in Antigua, based on English classical literature, was both a perfect education in literary taste and a perfect education in political ambiguity. Kincaid has said she became a novelist almost by accident - after leaving Antigua to work as an au pair in New York City, she went to college for a few years and began meeting up with writers and writing herself.
The spread of general education after the second world war swept all sorts of potential novelists, male and female, into the net, and one of the special features of the generation of novelists born in the 40s and 50s (Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949) is its range of national and ethnic diversity. She is now taller and stronger than her father, disdainful of her mother, and in a fever to leave the island, but the reader knows through the very richness of the novel that Annie can never quite leave behind the sharp combination of pleasure and pain that has been the strongest feature of her passionate childhood. The last chapter details Annie's vivid ambivalence about her departure from the island and from her parents. The next nine chapters detail Annie's simultaneous disillusionment and quest for independence as she becomes "a young lady" (a very suspect category), a star student in a rigidly British educational system, and her mother's loved and hated antagonist. Annie adores her mother and loves being in her presence, helping her with her daily tasks, dressing like her, being made to feel cherished and protected by her mother's knowledge and special rigour.
She lives an orderly and affection-filled existence with her mother and father in a small house he has built, which her mother keeps perfectly in order. A nnie John is a narrowly focused and intense portrayal of the inner life of an adolescent girl growing up in Antigua in the 1950s and 1960s.
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