The world of Crick Crack, Monkey is a dual one. Tee, the central character, is suspended between the warmth, spontaneity and exuberance of Tantie's household, into which she and her brother are received when their father emigrates to England, and the formality and pretension of Aunt Beatrice's world, which Tee is obliged to accept when she wins a scholarship. Tee's initiation into the negro middle class is an uneasy one: she is confused and disturbed by the discrimination of colour and class that she learns at Aunt Beatrice's hands and by the attitudes and values that divide her two aunts. The dislocation that Tee feels, the sense of alienation aroused by her discovery of a society marked by its gentility and affectation, the consequent erosion of dignity, early memories of happiness, ultimately Tee's integration with the factitious world of Aunt Beatrice-these shifting perceptions find no resolution, only acknowledgement that coherence will require a mature revaluation of her experience. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Merle Hodge, whose family lives in Curepe, Trinidad, was born in 1944. She won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship in 196.2 and read French at University College London (BA Hons, 1965; M.Phil., 1967). She has also spent long periods in France and Denmark and has visited the USA, Italy, Spain, Germany and the USSR. She has translated a collection of poems by the French Guyanese poet Leon Damas. She has lectured in French at the University of the West Indies, and taught in high schools in Trinidad and Grenada.