Book Review: Lucy is a story of contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. A story of a strong woman, an angry woman, who just wanted her mother to love her. Anger is the subtext of the entire tale, both the anger of coming from the colonial world to the "promised land," and the familiar and familial anger of a child ("I already had a mother who loved me, and I had come to see her love as a burden."). Lucy is both understandably and surprisingly angry. She is assertive, but also her own worst enemy. Lucy can be cruel and try to hurt people. She expects others to understand her (sometimes she just doesn't care), but has trouble understanding others. Mature, but child-like. She both loves and hates her homeland, she both loves and hates the U.S. When she receives a letter from home she thinks: "If I could put enough miles between me and the place from which that letter came ... would I not be free to take everything just as it came and not see hundreds of years in every gesture, every word spoken, every face?" She sees her own contradictions and her own strength, even as she is both self-righteous and self-pitying. She says her employer "was the kindest person I had ever known," but is happy to see her "getting a sip of [her] own bad medicine." Kincaid's Lucy is auto-biographical in parts, but also one of the more complex, complicated, incomplete characters ever written. This is a bitter story at times, but also warm and rewarding. Lucy is the story of a 19-year-old woman growing, learning, changing, becoming, transforming into who she will be, moving both geographically, and in her emotions and psyche. [4★]
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