SOURCE: A review of Lucy, in World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 1, Winter, 1992, p. 185.

In the following review, Hawthorne discusses issues of racial identity and cultural displacement in Lucy, concluding that such themes are treated with more complexity in this book than in Kincaid's previous works.

With Lucy Jamaica Kincaid continues a story of West Indian female development. Whereas the earlier bildungsroman-style works At the Bottom of the River (1983; see WLT 58:2, p. 316) and Annie John (1985; see WLT 59:4, p. 644) dealt with the adolescent years of a girl in the Caribbean, the new book presents a single learning year—the nineteenth—in the life of a character called Lucy, in the new setting of the United States. Lucy is an immigrant engaged to work as an au pair for a wealthy white couple and their four young daughters. Her year is complexly lived with its attendant difficult times, but it provides...