"Ostensibly, it's about the narrator's brother. It's a profile of his death from AIDS, and beyond that it's about Jamaica Kincaid herself and also the powerfully frustrating family dynamics that she experiences. She really pulls apart her relationships with her mother, her brother, and beyond that her relationship with the island of Antigua itself. This is a recurring theme in her work, her processing of the confusion and anger around her relationship with home and family.
Readers would be uncomfortable with this book for two reasons: One, the narrator is so distant. She is talking about the death of her brother in vivid detail, but doing it from this place of real disconnection; and so you may get frustrated with the fact that she seems so incompassionate. The other thing is that she writes in these long, long sections that really don't have any breaks; and she moves from present time to past time, from this character to this character. Upon close reading you see how she's tying it all together, but it can take some work to figure that out.
I didn't have very much of a problem with the narrator's voice. It's so unique the way that she constructs her sentences, and currently in my life right now, I'm very fascinated with sentence construction and word choice. I also felt connected because I, too, am someone that have at times felt like I'm supposed to be feeling a certain way about a person or a situation and yet I don't. She's very honest about the contradictions that she feels. I would give this book a three and a-half stars out of five."
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