Honestly I picked this because my favorite person in the world, my dog, is named Lucy. Just kidding…sort of. It is set mostly in the USA but flashs back to Antigua and Barbuda while it is still a colony of Great Britain
This book tells the story of 19-year-old Lucy who moves from the her island in the Caribbean to the USA to work as an au pair, and go to school. It was also not what I expected. It is blunt. There’s no other way to describe it. I’d almost call the protagonist a pessimist. She is trying to compare her past and her future and see why she is the way she is. She is especially focused on how her mother has affected her. She is an observer and the reader gets her pithy commentary on everything from her memories of her own school days to the expected betrayals of men. It rings of teenage angst; she wants to distance herself from her family, her island and their values. The crazy thing is, I kind of like her. She does things her own way and won’t let anyone walk over her. She refuses to be a victim. Watching her through her first year in the USA gives the country a different perspective. The cultural differences between herself and the family she works for keep a constant wall between them, no matter how hard Mariah tries to bring it down. The scene that stuck out in my mind was when Mariah cannot wait to show Lucy the daffodils in Spring because they bring her such joy and she wants Lucy to see her first daffodils. It finally happens, “Mariah do you realize that at ten years of age I had to learn by heart a long poem about some flowers I would not see in real life until I was nineteen?” Instead of joy, all it brought was anger at the British who conquered her island and made her learn their literature in their language. “Nothing could change the fact that where she same beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness.”
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