In this memoir of adolescence in Kingston, Jamaica

The daughter of a sprawling family raised in relative privilege explores the secret sense of exile that fuels her dreams of a new life in a foreign place. Along the way she falls in love with a lonely 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 with a weakness for the bottle; and decides to give up her virginity to a boy she meets after school. Rosemarie Robotham’s coming-of-age tale takes us inside middle-class life in Jamaica at a time when an exciting new political movement is sweeping the island and everything seems fraught with danger, yet thrillingly possible.