Author: Rosemarie Robotham
In this memoir of adolescence in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of a sprawling family of civil servants explores the secret sense of exile that fuels her dreams of a new life in foreign place. Along the way she befriends a lonely and mysterious girl who lives at the orphanage up the street from her school; finds her calling in a grandparent’s imperious command; wrestles with the emotions that attend the drinking of her father, a good and moral man she deeply admires, and falls for a boy she meets after school one day. Rosemarie Robotham’s coming of age tale takes us inside middle-class life in Jamaica at a time when an exciting new political movement was sweeping the island, and everything seemed fraught with danger, yet thrillingly possible.
