Girl by Jamaica Kincaid: Theme of love

Jamaica Kincaid's unconventional one-sentence, bare-bones narrative is an initiation story about a girl's coming-of-age set at the moment of separation between the age of innocence and the confusing, transforming entrance into adult experience. It is the story of a mother's attempt to train her adolescent daughter to learn appropriate cultural customs and more important, the rules of social behavior, especially that of proper sexual conduct befitting a well-reared girl.

Matos and Kimberly (pp. 844-857) mention that although the story is specifically about a West Indian mother's “gender grooming” her adolescent daughter for her impending female domestic ...