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Published in 1990, Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy is a diasporic coming-ofage narrative. 1 Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, published four years later, revisits many of the same themes-adolescent alienation, migration, traumatic uprooting from a childhood in the Caribbean (for Kincaid's Lucy, in Antigua; for Danticat's Sophie, in Haiti), and the challenges of establishing new relations in the US Indeed, Kincaid's Lucy and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory share many elements. Both novels recount the difficult process of coming-of-age in diaspora; both girlprotagonists have fractious relations with their mothers; both girls are in exile from their homelands; both girls are haunted by unknown paternal origins-Lucy knows only of her illegitimacy indirectly; and Sophie is the fatherless daughter of a raped mother, a fact that she learns only after arriving in Brooklyn; both girls experience recurrent dreams of being …