SOURCE: A review of The Autobiography of My Mother, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, p. 202.

In the following review, Brice-Finch offers a favorable summary of The Autobiography of My Mother.

What is the plight of a girl child who has no connection to her mother? If she is abandoned on a doorstep to be raised by nuns, perhaps she is then fated to die in childbirth. The grandchild is destined to be a solitary soul, disconnected as well. Such is the fate of a Carib maternal line in Jamaica Kincaid's 1996 novel. The Autobiography of My Mother is a lush evocation of personhood devoid of love, the emotion that binds one to another. Xuela Claudette Richardson wanders through her seventy years detached from humans but rooted in her environment.

The small island of Dominica is painted in fine strokes: the sea in its changing moods, the bright...