When Annie’s friendship goes downhill, Annie John learns that she cannot confide in her friends and family to guide her and she must shift into womanhood alone. She goes against her mother’s orders and begins to steal and lie. Annie’s relationship with the Red Girl gives Annie time to widen the gap Annie feels between herself and her mother. She wants to read books, travel, and make a difference in the world. Annie John wants nothing to do with boys. Gwen is a picture-perfect schoolgirl who follows all the rules and longs to become a wife and homemaker one day. While both girls stand in for the affection, Annie would have shared with her mother, these relationships also teach Annie more about her newfound identity. She must learn to be a “young lady.”Īs Annie grows from her mother, she gains a relationship closer to her friends, Gwen and then the Red Girl.

Annie wants the relationship with her and her mother to stay the same, but her mother knows that Annie cannot spend the rest of her life acting like a child. When Annie turns 12, however, her mother argues they can no longer wear matching dresses because Annie “cannot go around the rest of her life looking like a little me.” This moment causes a groundbreaking shift in Annie’s relationship with her mother.

Living this way, Annie thinks about how a person can live without a mother when Annie meets a girl whose mother has died, Annie considers the girl’s loss deeply shocking.

Annie and her mother wear matching dresses to show off how adorable they are together. Both her parents dedicate their attention to Annie her mother chews up food hard for Annie to manage herself, bathes, and massages her. When she reaches the age of 10, she has a few chores. At the beginning the book, Annie John believes that her life is perfect and an idyllic paradise. Through the novel’s course, Annie John moves from a child through puberty and to womanhood as she matures emotionally and physically. The central theme in Annie John is the titular character’s coming of age. Throughout the novel, two major themes are identified: coming of age and motherhood. As Annie John gets older, she questions her identity and seeks independence from the island. At the age of 12 years old, Annie’s mother pushes her away. The spirited Annie John who is inseparable from her doting mother, has an idyllic childhood growing up on Antigua’s paradise island. Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid is narrated in the first person through Annie’s eyes, who looks back on her coming of age as an adult.

Annie john book