Never had I ever thought that during college would I find a book that would move me as much as Harry Potter did. A novel that is not afraid to go deeper into a character’s mind, to be explicit and to show flaws within a human. In Lucy: A Novel, we follow a woman who denies where she originated from, mostly because of her mother. Her ambivalence towards her family causes her to seek success outside and believes that everything will be resolved from that. A heart-wrenching story that any foreigner can relate to.
Author Jamaica Kincaid perfectly shows in this novel what it is like to be inside a normal human’s life. She does not hold back in showing the darker thoughts of a character, thoughts we also occasionally have and are ashamed. Projecting onto other people is a great example and is something we constantly do, reacting outrageously and we just do not understand why. Our love for our parents can even sometimes turn into hate because the opposite of hate is not love but indifference. Once we come close to someone, we start to show our true colors (negative connotation, but it is not necessarily bad) to those we came to love and sometimes we blame for never truly having a connection, but it is possible that we just let our eight-year-old self control how we feel. I do not want to spoil too much, but Lucy did wish for her parent’s death and she confesses, “…would not have said such a thing to anyone else, for no one else meant so much to me” (Kincaid, 94).
The book may make you feel awkward, mainly because it feels as though we are reading Lucy’s diary. She projects her feelings into the words and directly onto us. A novel that can cause such connections is a rarity because it makes you reflect on yourself and wonder about everything or everyone that surrounds you. Everyone has felt, at some point, unfamiliar with their surroundings and feel alone as Lucy did. Lucy is a helpful novel that may help anyone through some tough times.