Mostly great

Interesting plot and a rollicking tale but the start of the narration by Ben Arogundade was a bit labored - really trying too hard to ram home the point of the whole story. It seemed quite unnecessary to me. Great story otherwise

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memorial book

This book was memorable for its differences. It was a complete surprise. Loved every minute.

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Blonde Roots

A fascinating flip on a “what might have been” historical narrative of the enslaved experience; And at the same time, a novel that keeps you interested in its characters and their stories.

Not the educational book you want, if you’re looking for the straight enslaved African story, but another great book from Bernardine Evaristo!

Listened to in one sitting!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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3 people found this helpful

Revisionist history at it's finest.

Loved this book. Such an interesting story and characters.
Exploring racism and turning it all on its head.

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DNF - inconsistent and lacking originality

As the title suggests I did not finish this story. I persisted until about two-thirds of the way through and just could not get over the major issues that I had with the story. This is my first experience with the author and based on other reviews I will still try her other work but am so far unimpressed.

To me this book had an excellent premise, race reversal, and I hoped that this would provide a vehicle with which to explore an alternate history of the slave trade but, unfortunately it did not carry this off. The book relied too heavily on the premise and simply reversed all of the common traits of slavery to a different race.

A frustrating element of the book was the consistent use of anachronisms which broke the immersion of the world. These ranged from a feudal society existing at the same time as trains and electronic music to references to scientific concepts that the characters could not have known. For a world that struggled to hold itself together these regular jarring points compounded the problem.

It is worth noting that I suspect some of the timeline inconsistencies were intentionally included in order to highlight the fact that human brutality transcends time and societies but again I don’t feel that this story achieved this.

Another aspect of the story that was a fun idea but too heavily leant into was the editing of historically European place names. Unfortunately, this idea lead to laundry lists of plays on words from the capital city Londolo to the ‘Africanising’ of every stop along a train line. While initially interesting this ends up feeling as if the author didn’t have the energy to source traditionally African places or naming styles or was trying to lean too hard on the reversal of history concept to be convincing.

A positive note for this book was definitely the narration. Charlotte Beaumont did an excellent job providing a consistent narrative voice, particularly when you realise that the actual text uses a difficult to parse phonetic spelling at times.

Overall, there are other frustrating elements of the book, and some good aspects too, but I feel as if this book missed the mark for me. I wouldn’t personally recommend the story but evidently there are plenty of people who would so there is value to be found in the story.

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