“Robin Miles’s expert narration truly brings out the best in Jamaica Kincaid’s tender account of a girl’s childhood in Antigua. Miles’s performance savors the tastes and smells of the novel’s Caribbean setting…and re-creates the excitement, innocence, and sorrows of childhood with grace and skill…A vibrant and compelling listening experience.” AudioFile
Description
A haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua.
An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence at the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, “It was in such a paradise that I lived.”
When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.
At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. “For I could not be sure,” she reflects, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”
A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Annie John focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice―urgent, demanding to be heard―is one that will not soon be forgotten.
Praise
“Robin Miles’s expert narration truly brings out the best in Jamaica Kincaid’s tender account of a girl’s childhood in Antigua. Miles’s performance savors the tastes and smells of the novel’s Caribbean setting…and re-creates the excitement, innocence, and sorrows of childhood with grace and skill…A vibrant and compelling listening experience.” AudioFile
“So touching and familiar it could be happening…to any of us…And that’s exactly the book’s strength, its wisdom, and its truth.” New York Times Book Review
“So neon-bright that the traditional story of a young girl’s passage into adolescence takes on a shimmering strangeness.” Los Angeles Times
“A magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie’s far from naïve awareness of the world around her.” Booklist (starred review)
“Rarely does a writer move as surely forward as Kincaid does in this plain, sharp, affecting first novel…truly capturing the agonizing give-and-take of parent/child love that goes delicately, yet irrevocably, awry.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Details
| Language | English |
|---|---|
| Release Day | Jul 4, 2016 |
| Release Date | July 5, 2016 |
| Release Date Machine | 1467676800 |
| Imprint | Blackstone Publishing |
| Provider | Blackstone Publishing |
| Categories | Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, African American, Coming of Age, Fiction - All, Fiction - Adult |
Author Bio
Jamaica Kincaid is the author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction, including See Now Then, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is the 2022 recipient of the Hadada Award, the Paris Review’s award for lifetime achievement. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature. She is a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard and a visiting writer at UCLA in the spring of 2022. She was born in St. John’s and is a former reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
Narrator Bio
Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, an Audie Award for directing, and many Earphones Awards. Her film and television acting credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors’ unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a BA degree in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.
Overview
A haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua.
An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence at the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, “It was in such a paradise that I lived.”
When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.
At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. “For I could not be sure,” she reflects, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”
A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Annie John focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice―urgent, demanding to be heard―is one that will not soon be forgotten.
Reviews
Write Your Own Review