The River's Song A Novel

This engaging coming-of-age novel looks back over the idyllic Jamaican girlhood and the both alienating and transforming experience of winning a scholarship to the most prestigious girls' boarding school on the island. Atypical of Caribbean literature because of its description of a young girl's sexual awakening, the novel offers poetic descriptions of rural and urban Jamaica and delightful characterizations of warm and lively women, including the narrator's mother, grandmother, and neighbors.

Jacqueline Bishop teaches writing at New York University and literature at Medgar Evers College. The winner of a James Mitchener Creative Writing Fellowship, she is the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters and the author of Fauna, a collection of poems. She lives in Jamaica and New York City.