SOURCE: “The Exile's Bitter Return,” in Washington Post Book World, July 3, 1988, p. 14.

In the following review of A Small Place, Nicholson commends Kincaid's impassioned denunciation of Antigua's colonial legacy, but finds fault with what he sees as her failure to move beyond description.

At a time when the travel narrative seems to be enjoying a renaissance in American publishing it is difficult to find a place in that genre for this bitter little book [A Small Place]. Though it is a narrative of the author's return from the United States to her native land, the island of Antigua, this is no simple account of a journey home. Readers who come expecting visits to once familiar places, episodes detailing encounters with picturesque islanders and the insights into self that inevitably accrue to the returned exile writing about his return, will be disappointed. Instead, Jamaica Kincaid delivers a sour, inconclusive...