River's Song

Gloria, living with her mother in a Kingston tenement yard, wins a scholarship to one of Jamaica's best girls' schools. She is the engaging narrator of the at first alienating and then transforming experiences of an education that in time takes her away from her mother, friends and the island; of her consciousness of bodily change and sexual awakening; of her growth of adult awareness of a Jamaica of class division, endemic violence and the new spectre of HIV-AIDS. The novel's strengths lie in the pace, economy and shapeliness of its page-turning narrative; in its poetic descriptions of urban and rural Jamaica; and above all in the quality of its characterisation and the dramatisation of Gloria's relationships with her mother, grandmother and the girls she has always known in her grandmother's rural village, with Rachel, their neighbour in the yard who is Gloria's rock of understanding, and, at the heart of the novel, with Annie, the purest and indivisible love of her adolescent years.