Navigating new relationships

The strange familiarity of the situation envelops you as the story unfolds.

A mother's influence in one's life can show up so many times. There is a love and hate relationship at play between the maturing young woman, herself, and the shadow of her mother that is always close by. We all know it so well.

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Lucy's Story

interesting view of a young Windrush travellers experience of living in sixties Britian. Lucy's view of English wealth, family values and her own background highlights many moral questions

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Excellent

Lucy is a continuation of Annie Jones by the same author. A very interesting story of coming of age .

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A disappointing second novel

This is a disappointing work. It reads more like part two of Annie John. Same voice, same attitude, same character. Only Annie John went off to England a sulky, self possessed teenager who loves and hates her parents. In Lucy, Kincaid repeats a story that was told in Annie John about the father who lost his grandmother who he used to share a bed with.

Lucy felt like a story which went on too long. It passed its end point and waffled on. Whilst I enjoyed Annie John which was funny, angsty and captured the spirit and life of a confident and smart teenage girl in a post World War 2 and still colonial Caribbean island.

Lucy was just a series of observations of a Black Caribbean young woman in the USA working as an au pair who has not quite left home behind in her heart and mind, whilst desiring this distance both physically and emotionally.

Lucy existed in a white world and didn’t explore the impact of being a black Caribbean woman in this world. It is as if race and foreignness didn’t matter. It would have been hard at that time in history for there not to have been any racialised incidents. She touched on their colonial attitudes towards the ‘islands’. The Caribbean territories portrayed as a set of places with no real identity but sun, sea, sand and island ‘paradises’ to escape to; a set of places with no real people or culture worth paying attention to. Lucy didn’t like that. A really astute observation.

But what about Lucy’s relationship to the rest of America including Black America? They were largely ignored as if they didn’t exist. As if the writer chose not to make them exist. This is the most disappointing thing about Lucy. Especially since it’s set in New York City where she must have come into contact with African Americans, other Caribbean people and confront for the first time, her own blackness and foreignness. Her blackness being irrelevant in the Caribbean.

A disappointing reading experience not because the writer must deal with the issue of race or racism. She doesn’t have to. But because the story was deliberately insular. It reads like a spiteful work. As spiteful as the character, Lucy.

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1 person found this helpful

Not for Me.

While listening to Lucy, I felt like my mum's long lost friend had finally found her whereabouts, come over and tried to summarise the last twenty years of her life, which they hadn't seen each other. There was no actual structure or point to their stories, and they would flip from one irrelevant thing to another without providing any real meaning to each snippet of story they were covering.

Although the timing of some events were evident, most skipped back and forth through the time since Lucy's arrival, that I was unaware whether it was one hour/day/month or year to the next.

It's a shame that the whole thing didn't feel as put together because the narrator had an excellent tone to her voice, with no annoying ticks. I could listen to her read a good story, which has some form of plot structure, all day long

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