Jamaica Kincaid's most beguiling and powerful work to date. Nineteen-year-old Lucy comes to America from the West Indies to work for a couple and their four children. Almost at once, Lucy begins to see cracks in the fascade of this handsome, rich, and seemingly happy family. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Kincaid ( At the Bottom of the River ; Annie John ) has with this novel created an insouciant yet vulnerable narrator in the person of Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies who works as an au pair for a seemingly happy family in an unidentified city that one assumes is New York. Lucy is fascinated with her discoveries about American life--``At first it was all so new that I had to smile with my mouth turned down at the corners''--and with Mariah, Lewis and their four golden little daughters. Their pleasure in life intrigues Lucy, who observes, ``Even when a little rain fell, they would admire the way it streaked through the blank air.'' Lucy has renounced her own family and past, but at the same time she paradoxically expresses culturally imbued views with arrogance. She sees the world around her with both awe and contempt, and maintains a unique dead certainty about how people are. Her own sexual exploits seem more mysterious to her than the deterioration of Lewis and Mariah's marriage, which she presciently and detachedly observes. This is a slim book but Kincaid has crafted it with a spare elegance that has brilliance in its very simplicity. Lucy's is a haunting voice, and Kincaid's originality has never been more evident. First serial to the New Yorker; Literary Guild selection. Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Like her Annie John ( LJ 4/1/85), Kincaid's new heroine travels the coming-of-age road. Lucy, a 19-year-old West Indi an, sheds her cloistered colonial upbringing by accepting a job as an au pair in New York--the perfect setting for satisfying her gluttonous appetite for both mental and sensual stimulation. The startling disintegration of her employers' marriage triggers flashbacks of home and family; the reflected details are unsettling. Lucy finds being born ``woman'' places her in a territory she wants to explore and at the same time escape. As she begins her exploration, cathartic tears blur the first pages of her diary. But Lucy plunges ahead, reassured by the discovery of an authentic self. Strong in style and substance, dazzling with its sharp-edged prose, this is a novel no one should miss. Literary Guild selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/90. Bibi S. Thompson, ``Library Journal'' Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information