From the cover, "Jamaica Kincaid's new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes: 'It is possible that he would have expected better care for one than the other , but which one I do not know, because he was a very vain man.'"

It is difficult to explain what I love about Jamaica Kincaid. The story line is intriguing but not nearly as important to me as her lusciously poetic language. The reader is inside the mind of Xuela and understands her soul. "In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the voices that should have come out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person I did not allow myself to become" (228). "...death is the inevitable of all inevitables, the certainty in every uncertainty" (125).