Questions

I am deeply interested in the novel, Lucy.  One of my favorite things about the book is the way Jamaica Kincaid focuses and centers her writing around the thought process and maturity of a young teenage girl.  Lucy's ideas, questions, and thinking overall reflect that of a teenage girl and make the story more interesting.  She is confused about her life right now and like most young girls going through the process of growing into a woman, Lucy is confused about her identity and where she belongs in life.  However, it is clear that she is determined to become someone she wants to be, not someone that someone else wants her to be.  At one point Lucy even shudders at the thought of being exactly like her mother: "I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone" (36).  Lucy reveals her independency by making the choice to come to the states to live a freer life.  Just as she is trying to make a place for herself in the states, she is also trying to make a place within herself: She is fighting to learn and adjust to the new place she finds herself in and begins to feel that if "[she] could put enough miles between [herself] and the place from which that letter came, and if [she] could put enough events between [her] and the events mentioned in the letter, would [she] not be free to take everything jut as it came and not see hundreds of years in every gesture, every word spoken, every face?"  Although she is homesick and misses what she once wished so bad to leave behind, she is still trying to figure out this new world she is in and find the woman she is to become.  Right now, Lucy seems like a stranger to herself.  I cannot wait to see how she becomes familiar with the person she is and how she grows throughout this novel and through her experiences with Mariah and her new "family".