SynopsisThis is a story about enslavement, brutal injustice, and the awful barbarity of men towards fellow humans.It’s serious and thought provoking, it’s a subject matter which has been written about and made into much watched films. The reader here is drawn into stories that are shameful by Evaristo’s clever inversion of master and slave(ry). In this book those who exploit, murder and rape have black skins, and the oppressed are white. The Prologue statement is sobering: “remembering the 10-1...

Reading this was heartbreaking. Not because it’s the raw, brilliantly creative, and insightful tale of a woman’s experience of slavery I expected, but because I adored Girl, Woman, Other (see my review HERE), and I found nothing of merit in this - not even allowing for its being written 12 years ago (2008), as satire that borders YA. The sit The concept of reversal/recasting is fine, though hardly original (see Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor's Tale, serialised from 1980, Malorie Blackman’s No...

Critics would have you believe that Ms. Evaristo has written an "astonishing," "clever," and "beautiful" novel about an alternative history scenario to the slave trade.Every morning I'd repeat an uplifting mantra to myself while looking in the mirror. I may be fair and flaxen. I may have slim nostrils and slender lips. I may have oil-rich hair and a non-rotund bottom. I may blush easily, go rubicund in the sun and have covert yet mentally alert blue eyes. Yes, I may be whyte. But I am whyte and

What if Africans had been the ones to enslave Europeans instead of the other way around? That’s the premise Evaristo uses to launch this harrowing alternate history, which in general does a fantastic job shedding fresh light not just on the horrors of slavery—which, even if we are all generally aware of them, it can never hurt to be reminded of in stark, brutal, specific detail: people did these things to other people—but also on slavery’s ongoing ripples and aftereffects, exposing the very whit...

One of the poorest written books I've read in a while. For good writing and well thought out world building on this topic, read Steven Barnes's 'Lion's Blood' and 'Zulu Heart' instead.

I would actually give this book 4.5 stars if I could. The main reason I don't give it a full 5 stars is because I had a hard time with understanding some of the world building. There were some technologies of our modern world they seemed to have, but not others so I felt a bit lost trying to figure out where and when to place this in my mind.I did like how she mixed in cultural things that people would be able to identify as from somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Africa, so that when she turne...

My only complaint about Bernardine Evaristo's alternate history of racial slavery is that it's 150 years late. Imagine the outrage this clever novel would have provoked alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe's incendiary story or Frederick Douglass's memoir! But now, amid the warm glow of 21st-century liberalism, with our brilliant black president, what could we possibly learn from a new satire of slavery?Plenty.Blonde Roots turns the whole world on its nappy head, and you'll be surprised how different...

Blonde Roots is set in a parallel universe, where African, not European, cultures use shipping and weapons technology to create colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, and to kidnap millions of people and enslave them to work on sugar plantations. Residents of the Atlantic coastal fringes of Europa - the English, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Scandinavians - are particularly at risk of being stolen away from their families, regardless of rank or priviledge, and crammed into slave ships bou...

A little bit of cleverness goes a long way. Too much -- jumbled anachronism, twisted geography, transplanted London place names, and a literal Underground Railway (hah!) -- makes a supposedly thought provoking novel more like a spin through a clever blog.The central race flipping premise isn't thought out. It wobbles between crude stereotypes and simple re-hashing of other people's books about slavery. Reading it so soon after the Book of Night Women, an entirely passionate, serious, heartrendin...

4.5 stars rounded upA clever satire on race and slavery. Evaristo, who is of Nigerian and British descent, generally writes poetry, but this is a novel about the slave trade. It is the slave trade in reverse; in Evaristo’s language the whytes are the slaves and the blaks are the masters and slave-owners. A number of reviewers have complained about time lines, geography and historical accuracy. My advice would be suspend that sort of judgement. This is a satire. It’s not fantasy, but nor has the

This book is hard to classify! I really liked it, and again enjoyed the springing vitality of the language that I liked in The Emperor's Babe -- it must come from Evaristo's being a poet. I like the way she has of being deliberately anachronistic.The book actually worked better for me than I thought it would -- I wasn't sure what the point was of flipping the races, but having read it I see that there is a point and it is useful to see it the other way around. (Liked the European folk songs and

ARGH, this book is seriously not okay. I felt so unbelievably uncomfortable reading it, there was no point or intelligence behind the decision to reverse the slave trade - all the message seemed to be was poor whites look how mean black people are?!?!? And if this is the only way for white people to feel bad about or understand the slave trade then that's repugnant and we need to wake the fuck up.

I knew I was in for something very different when I chose to read this book, which is basically a switcheroo on the idea of African slavery. Basically in this book the Africans take the whites as slaves from Europe and America and bring them back to Africa. There are some parts that are a bit contrived or cheesy, but for the most part the author did a really good job of really putting the reader in a slave's place. Also, I hadn't expected to get the viewpoint of the slave owner, so that was inte...

Evaristo’s novels just make me think and feel so much - I think she’s brilliant.

When I read this book’s description, I thought: Wow! What a genuinely interesting, creative, and fresh idea for a novel. And Elle Magazine, my barometer for books I’d probably enjoy, praised it. Yet I was disappointed. The story is slow paced. It alternates between two points of view, the heroine (a white slave girl) and our antagonist (a black slave trader). But for some reason the heroine is dull at best, and the slave trader is witty making for a disturbing debate of whom to root for. The aut...

This is an interesting and ultimately quite moving mixture of history and satire. Evaristo's premise is to describe the history of a slave, her family and her owners, with the twist that the roles of Britain and West Africa reversed. This reversal provides the humour, but the details of what slaves suffered are played pretty straight, and without the satire would make for rather a bleak narrative. This was Evaristo's first prose novel - her earlier works were mostly written in verse.

There were parts of this that I really enjoyed and found both thought-provoking and unexpectedly funny at times (I sincerely hope certain aspects of this were meant to be read as humorous) but there were also extended periods where my focus drifted entirely and I had to rewind the audiobook and force myself to pay attention. For me there was a fairly equal balance between these two feelings, a three star rating for a book that felt at various times a two star read as well as a four.I did enjoy m...

Doris Scagglethorpe, the daughter of a cabbage farmer, was ten years old when she's captured by slavers. Now twenty years later, she's trying to escape.[return][return]This is an interesting premise. Blacks (or blaks, as they are inexplicably called in the book (more on that later)) are the dominant race and whites (whytes) are the ones enslaved. It's not an alternate history, nor is it a fantasy set in another world. I'm not really sure what it is, or what it wants to be, and that was the probl...

I didn't understand the point of this book. Ordinarily, I don't worry about the point of a book; most of them are written simply because the author had an idea for a story and they wrote it down. And, that is probably the case here, but the author took something that is known, well-known, and twisted it for her own purposes and I don't know what those purposes are/were.This is a story about the slave trade. But, instead of Africans being captured and sold into slavery, Europeans were. The main A...

What began as a cute and somewhat clever 'what if' tale of a reversal in the white folk enslaving the black quickly became a dragged out and horribly graphic story that took too long to end. It also had little more than its gimmick to promote itself.