Blonde Roots: From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

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The narrator describes her captors: `All the stories I'd heard were true because even though it was cold, they wore only cotton strips to cover their privates so they shivered and sneezed and were covered with goose pimples . Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today. Doris is a feisty and irrepressible character and although often horrific, her story is an engrossing page turner.

She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006, and she received an MBE in 2009. In fact, in describing much of the European slave experience, the author borrowed from documented African slave experiences.

Bernardine Evaristo, of British and Nigerian descent, has come up with an ingenious way of refreshing the horrors of the slave trade: by creating a photographic negative of historical reality, where what was black becomes white and vice versa.

Questo romanzo esilarante è una satira intelligente sulla razza e la schiavitù: una rivisitazione sulla tratta degli schiavi, a parti invertite. 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. but her language retains its musicality and exuberance, particularly in Doris's un-self-pitying, drily comic tone. 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.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 turned the tables and blaks where those in power and enslaving whytes, it makes many readers really think and become aware of prejudices they may not have consciously thought about before. Bernardine Evaristo always dares to be different ( New Nation ) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. As always, the values of the dominant culture reflect its power structure; the black master's body and attitudes are the desired norm, even the ideal. Since racist prejudice lay at the heart of the trade, indigenous social strata were no ultimate protection against capture. Criminals and prisoners of war were hot favourites, but when they weren't available it was anyone who could be captured, so long as they weren't too old or, in Percy's case, his own serfs.