In all honesty, I wouldn't have read this book had it not been for the fact that the Southwark libraries app grants access to many of Evaristo's books since she won the Booker Prize.
On the plus side, it made me realize that the "good" but not "one in a generation" kind of authors very rarely invent something from scratch and that, in this case, Colson Whitehead must have borrowed quite a bit from Blonde Roots for his The Underground Railroad (or maybe it's an incredible coincidence that both main characters take an actual underground railroad to try to escape slavery?).
On the down side, I never really found myself gripped by this book.
One interesting thing though: despite the frequent reminders that the slaves are white and the slave-owners black, I struggled to picture them as such and my mental image of Doris often switched between that of a white and a black woman. Talk about the power of ingrained perceptions and experience...
No comments:
Post a Comment