Rating: WARTY!
This was an audiobook telling a story of slavery from the first person perspective of a young girl. The subtitle claims it's "A Novel in Verse" but it's actually not, thankfully. It was read by an actor with the interesting name of Bahni (pronounced Bonney) Turpin, and while her own voice was not bad at all, the first person voice of the story really turned me off, because it seemed so inauthentic.
I know authors do this to try and present a sense of immediacy and to bring a reader in, but for me, it typically pushes me out. Once in a while I find a FPV story that I can stand to read, but far more often than not, they're obnoxious. This was especially true in this case where the girl was being forced to leave her family and take up residence in 'The Big House' as a domestic slave. She was one of the most whiny, self-centered, and air-headed characters I've ever read about.
The novels blurb claims that the author "unearths a startling chapter of American history -- the remarkable story of runaways who sought sanctuary in the wilds of the Great Dismal Swamp," but this is an outright lie. If anyone unearthed it apart from the historians, it was Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. I wonder if the author of this novel ever read that? She certainly doesn't acknowledge it if she did.
Slavery was an unforgivable abomination perpetrated by a smug, laughably 'superior', and self-righteous Christian population on a group of people they considered less than human, but there's nothing we can do to go back and right those appalling wrongs. All we can do for those people is to never forget them and to never let it happen again, but the truth is there are more pressing immediate problems which a wallow in the past will not fix. These problems are here and now, and they can be solved, but as long as our eyes are focused on history, they're not going to turn and take a hard look at where they should be aimed: current-day problems, some of which are echoes of the very history people are so distracted by. This book touched upon three issues that can be thought of very loosely as slavery or as coming out of slavery and which can be solved.
The first is racial issues still going on today which have deep roots in what happened when brutal men literally bought Africans from other Africans and floated them across an entire ocean to work these victims to death in plantations owned by Christian folk. The reason I mention their faith is because this book mentions "The Good Lord" irritatingly often.
It should have said "Good God!" as an exclamation of disbelief, because this god did absolutely nothing whatsoever to stop this abduction and brutality. It did no more than it did for the ancient Hebrews when they were hauled off into slavery, which was diddly-squat. Why anyone would put faith in such a worthless absentee god like that has long been a mystery to me, but this book idiotically keeps on having these people put their faith in what was - to them, hailing as they did from Africa - a completely alien god!
These Christians were claiming to be delivering these 'heathens' into the Christian faith, these were the heathens who were living (near enough for humans!) in complete harmony with nature, and who were being dragged across the Atlantic to live in a Christian community which was systematically raping the land it had stolen from American Indians who had been also largely living in harmony with nature! Go figure.
The second problem was entirely connected with that business (I use the term advisedly) of the raping o' the land. The problem back then was rich, armed white folks taking advantage of poor black folks. Now it's the insanely wealthy one percent taking advantage of the entire planet. The problem has become worse and it's become diversified: there's no race involved in this, only greed, as in 'how much more money can we make by exploiting more people' or 'by exploiting people more'?
The third problem is these people who are mostly though not exclusively white men, but they're not oppressing only people of color, they're oppressing all of us, but in particular people of color and women, who are seen as chattel by far too many of these men. This also where the #MeToo movement and the term 'glass ceiling' came from.
The real problem with this novel though is the poor writing. I know it's a novel for children, but does that mean that everything must be pedantically spelled-out and the slave owners be rendered as one-dimensional caricatures? The girl herself is ham-fistedly named Grace, and she causes all of her own troubles because she cannot control her mouth and she simply will not listen to advice. This is what brings all her troubles down not just on her, but also on her family. So they had to live in a swamp, Well, we were evicted from our swamp. We had to go and live in a cardboard box in't middle o' motorway! Each morning we had to get up and lick road clean wi't tung!
That was an excerpt from Monty Python's "The Four Swampmen." You know, I don't expect an author of a novel like this to portray slave owners in a warm light, or even have much imagination, but was it really necessary to render the owner's wife as a pinch-faced cartoon character? Subtlety (and creativity for that matter) appears nowhere in this author's lexicon quite evidently, so in that same vein let me say that this novel sucks, and I don't recommend it. After listening to only the beginning portion, I wanted Grace to sink into that blessèd swamp.
