The River’s Song

Jacqueline Bishop invests the familiar shape of the coming-of-age novel with a freshness and individual quality of voice that makes reading it a constant delight. Gloria, living with her mother in a Kingston tenement yard, wins a scholarship to one of Jamaica’s best girls’ schools. She is the engaging narrator of the first alienating and then transforming experiences of an education that in time takes her away from her mother, friends and island; of her consciousness of bodily change and sexual awakening; of her growth of adult awareness of a Jamaica of class division, endemic violence and the new spectre of HIV-AIDS. The novel’s strengths lie in the pace, economy and shapeliness of its page-turning narrative; in its poetic descriptions of urban and rural Jamaica; and above all in the quality of its characterisation and the dramatisation of Gloria’s relationship with her mother, grandmother and the girls she has always known in her grandmother’s rural village, with Rachel, a prostitute and their neighbour in the yard who is Gloria’s rock of understanding, and, at the heart of the novel, with Annie, the purest and indivisible love of her adolescent years.