In the following excerpt, reviewer Austin compares Jamaica Kincaid's first novel, Annie John, with her collection of short stories. Austin states that Kincaid writes well-crafted, passionate accounts of a past filled with curious events.

"Write what you know," says the experienced author to the younger one. Hence the critic's 10-mile bookshelf of breathless first novels about growing up normal: meager accounts, bitter, adoring, or pompous, of parents and school; death and love; television, baseball, dry or wet dreams. Jamaica Kincaid's first novel is not, thank the Muse, one of these: instead, it is one of those perfectly balanced wanderings through time which seem to spring direct from Nature. The parents and school, death and love are there, but oh, with what a difference, and 148 pages become 300 when you read a book twice. In her collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, and here, in Annie...