Annie John

Have you ever felt the love for your mother fade? Have you ever thought that you might not want to be friends anymore with a person you thought earlier you could not live without? Has your life changed significantly since your childhood?

Annie John, written by Jamaica Kincaid, tells us the story of Annie John, a black girl that grows up in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. She is the only child of her mother and her father, although she has half-brothers and sisters out of her fathers earlier relationships. The women that her father once loved wish her and her mother ill, but still she has a sheltered childhood. The problems begin when she gets older and is to become a lady. Her mother treats her differently and Annie is shocked by the thought of leaving this house at some day to live with her own family. A distance is created by her and her mother between them, especially when Annie has to go to a new school. To overcome the new lack of the love of her mother she creates herself a circle of friends that at the beginning admire her for being the smartest one in the class. Her teachers like her, because she is fast in understanding new things and keeping them in mind. She usually wins in every competition in school and soon seems to be bored in her classes. From now on she starts to think about other things like how to make her breasts grow. Her best friend is a girl that she meet at her first school day in her new school, but the view of their friendship changes when she meets the Red Girl. Annie starts to do things that her mother doesn't approve of and her family life becomes worse and worse. Therefore, her mother and her set up two different faces, one for themselves, one for everybody else. Annie probably thought her life would go on and on this way, but in the end the day comes that she never dared to think of during her childhood