The Book of Negroes: The award-winning classic bestseller

The matter-of-fact narration is distracting. I felt that that book does not try to involve the readers. My personal opinion is that the whole idea of the story is very promising. But felt that something was missing...

Excellent bouquin qui aborde cette période particulièrement pénible de l'histoire américaine de manière totalement différence de Roots, j'ai nettement préféré ce livre-ci

There are some books you don't feel qualified to review. Here am I, a middle aged, Australian woman who, although I have faced gender discrimination in my life, have never remotely dealt with anything like the challenges faced by our heroine, Animata Diallo. Yet, I felt strongly connected to her. Her love of language, her dignity, her spirit and love of family - all these things I can relate to. To me, she was a strangely modern character, well ahead of her time, strong, outspoken, reflective but not once during the book did I feel that Lawrence Hill portrayed her unrealistically. On a side note, I find that the fact that Hill penned his protagonist as female is interesting in itself - he certainly "captures" the female psyche well! Lawrence Hill has done his homework and, in doing so, has educated and enlightened me. I had little knowledge of the African Slave trade. Sure, I knew that people were captured from different language groups, bound together and shipped to wherever they would fetch the highest price whilst facing unspeakable cruelties and indignities, but that was about it. I didn't know anything about daily life on the plantations, the Book of Negroes, the shipment of Loyalists to Nova Scotia and other destinations, the establishment of Sierra Leone. I had seen Slaves as wretched people and, undoubtedly they were but I hadn't realised the extent to which they were able to form communities, comfort and nurture each other and tenuously keep in touch with others through the underground "fishnet" system. To say that they often triumphed over adversity would be an understatement. Yet, their losses and the humiliations inflicted on them were mind numbing. On considering what Animata lost, gained back, lost again, all the while enduring uninagineable hardship, it was difficult to see her surviving and yet she did - magnificently so. At the risk of spoiling other readers' enjoyment of her story, I will only say that her survival is only one of the uplifting events in this book of sorrows. The writing is spectacular but never inaccessible. Lawrence Hill tells this epic tale simply. Written in the first person and in a narrative style (both styles I usually steer clear of), it is never dry or dull and doesn't intimidate the reader. And his writing is poetic. How could you not cry when you read something like "Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons"? I did have a couple of minor issues with the ending of the story - it was a bit "neat" for me and felt a bit rushed (as if Hill had a publishing deadline to meet or something) but those issues didn't diminish my overall reading experience one little bit! In summary, to those readers who long to read something of substance, READ THIS BOOK. You will learn so much about the lives of the slaves ripped from their homelands and those born into slavery. You will also be uplifted by the resilience of the human spirit and what it's capable of accomplishing. But you won't just learn - you will also get to read a well researched, well written, rollicking good book! And those are few and far between!

No es la historia mil veces leida, tiene un alcance mucho más amplio y al ser basada en hechos reales tiene mucho encanto

I never knew this book existed until I started seeing the newly released book with the television show cover coming up across my Facebook news feed. At the very same time my daughter was reading Underground to Canada in her grade 7 Language class and she had heard about the television show and book. She came home from school and said she wanted the book. (she is an extremely advanced and avid reader). I ordered the book from amazon and added it to my goodreads to read shelf. I Noticed it had an exceptional rating. Now as far as ratings go you might love a book that I turn out to dislike, or I might love a book that you may dislike. So I try not to choose a book based solely on its rating. But I have several friends and family members who read this book and said it was well worth the read. It was very well written. First I should say that this book is a work of fiction, but even though the detail in this book does an excellent job of detailing what life was like as a slave. It is about slavery but even more then that it is about one woman’s journey from being snatched in Africa, to her journey into slavery, through slavery, and beyond. The story begins in a time where she is an older lady and wants to write her own autobiography. She wants to write it herself because she wants it to be accurate. Lawrence Hill does an exceptional job bringing her story to life with vivid details through Aminata’s eyes. Aminata Diallo was snatched in West Africa as an 11 year old child and forced to walk for months to sea where she would then board a ship and cross over to become a slave in South Carolina. Aminata proves to be an exceptionally talented person even from the young age of 11 she was already ‘catching babies’. As the story progresses she becomes more and more literate and more determined to fight for not only her freedom, but the freedom of all slaves. I won’t go into any more details, don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who has not read this book yet. This was one of the best books I have read in a long time and more than deserved the 5 star rating I gave it on Goodreads.

Fascinating history.