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Blonde Roots [Paperback]

Bernardine Evaristo (Author)

3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Publication Date: 30 April 2009

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . .

In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

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Product details

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Penguin (30 April 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0141031522
ISBN-13: 978-0141031521
Product Dimensions: 1.7 x 12.8 x 19.6 cm

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 212,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

'A hugely imaginative tale that invites important debates, challenging fundamental perceptions of race, culture and history' Independent on Sunday 'This brilliant novel will fulfil [Evaristo's] purpose of making readers view the transatlantic slave trade with fresh eyes' The Times 'Reimagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence ... human and real' Guardian

Review

`Novelists are irresistably drawn to the `what if' game. But it has seldom been done on the scale of Bernardine Evaristo's astonishing new novel which takes one of the great horrors of history and turns it on its head. ...Evaristo is a poet and the novel is full of playful anachronisms, many of them based around language and emotions that sound decidedly 20th century. But it's also a satire, almost Swiftian in its imaginative leaps, in which humour and suffering are effortlessly intermingled. ...This brilliant novel will fulfil her purpose of making readers view the transatlantic slave trade with fresh eyes.'

`'Writers messing around with history is nothing new, but the way that Evaristo entirely inverts the story of slavery is mesmerising. She has imagined the world with linguistic flourishes, creating a tale that is satirical as well as moving.'

'I thought this was an absolutely amazing book...a reminder of what great literature is about.'
Dreda Say Mitchell, Critic
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars

3.9 out of 5 stars

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly imaginative 9 Sep 2008

By J. Ross

Format:Hardcover

I came to this book with a sense of anticipation after reading Bernardine Evaristo's previous works, especially 'Emperor's Babe'. Great storytelling, a wonderful deployment of satire, and deep knowledge of her subject matter are, in my view, the triple gifts of this writer. When combined - as they are in Blonde Roots - they make for a brilliant work. Prize-winning stuff!

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Alex Haley would be proud 2 Sep 2008

By Mr. S. Vibert

Format:Hardcover

I am a big fan of Alex Haley's roots and therefore was curious to see how Evaristo would adapt it. This is a very well written book, with very clever observations and it manages to touch on very sensitive racial subject without ever souding racist. It is very funny but not for the faint hearted, as it depicts the horrors of slavery. Love it.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A promising idea, gripping in parts, but badly thought out 14 Jun 2011

By purplepadma VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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 bound for the New World. The reader knows from the outset that this is not alternate history of our own universe, because the author has included a map showing Aphrika in the North, Europa in the South, and the Carribean islands unchanged, but renamed the West Japanese Islands.

The idea is interesting, and has been explored by other authors (such as Mallory Blackman, in whose Noughts and Crosses series it is taken for granted that the dominant culture is that of black people, and white people are treated as inferior). Unfortunately, in White Roots the execution of the idea is rather muddled and extremely illogical. For a start, why is there any need to have altered geography? The slave/sugar trade triangle could just have easily worked with geography unchanged, but Africa as the pivotal point of power. Linguistically, the novel is very puzzling; the slaves speak a kind of Patois, but the author seems to assume that in the White Roots universe there would be little difference from real life Caribbean Patois.... We are repeatedly told that the slaves are from a mixture of European countries, and logically therefore the Patois would be an blend of Abrossan combined with elements of grammar and vocabulary from Germanic and Hispanic European languages, but there is no evidence of this at all, and we get a phonetic representation of what sounds to me like contemporary Jamaican patois. Even when two slaves discover that they are from the same country, they do not speak their native language together - even when this is English.

Most puzzling of all is the question of when the novel is supposed to be set. Various pointers (not least the "what happened next" postscript) suggest the early twentieth century at the latest; the slave ships appear to be sailing boats, and there is no electricity, although there is a disused Londolo Underground. The turns of phrase used by high status Aphrikans echo 18th or early 19th century real life discourse on slavery, and the Europeans clearly operate a system of workers on land-owners' estates. Yet characters use skateboards; they "airpunch"; and the young male Whyte slaves call themselves names such as "Bad Bwoy" or "Totallee Kross." Evaristo appears to be trying to cram current issues of identity and social exclusion among black youth in modern day Britain or America into a analysis of 18th/19th century attitudes to race and colonialism, and it simply doesn't work.

It's a pity, because there are sections of the novel which are much more thought-provoking, but these are lost in the overall lack of logic. Book Two, in which Chief Kaga Konata Katamba gives us his memoirs of his first trip to the Heart of Darkness which is the Cabbage Coast, and describes his first encounters with the backwards-seeming natives of England, is well done. It reminded me somewhat of Body Ritual Among the Nacirema in its ability to dismantle our own cultural assumptions with the eye of the outside, and I couldn't help feeling that had the novel as a whole been writted in this vein, it would have been much harder-hitting.

Overall, however, if you want to read about the real horrors of slavery from the point of view of a slave woman, I'm afraid you are much better off grabbing a copy of Andrea Levy's The Long Song. Read more ›

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful awful book 8 May 2011

By pinkdodo

Format:Paperback

Oh my goodness. Where to start. I hated this book. It is the story of what life might have been like if the white people 'whytes' were enslaved. Sounds promising. But she's trying to be funny too.... No no. No no. I read it as fast as I could to get it out of my life. Tastelessly done, with poor and grossly misplaced humour, it depicts slavery like a horrible histories book...but not funny. As if to add insult to injury, the book is dedicated to the victims of slavery and their descendants! It is so flippantly descriptive of the horrors of the slave ships, and making out the life and escape of slaves were not THAT bad really. She makes the slaves speak in a poor version of English, possibly an African accent after years of capture, but it makes the slaves come across as stupid, when the narrator has been there longer than most and still maintains her English tones. This patois makes it jerky to read and even more painful. Just, so awful that the rave reviews on the front cover made me angry whenever I saw this book, if I could give it a zero, I would. Awful.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Pause for thought - but when? 11 Jun 2009

By S. J. Binnie

Format:Paperback

This book flips the slave trade on its head and really makes you question how anyone could have bought the propaganda that enabled white traders to sleep at night with sweet dreams. The way that the slaves are perceived as having no feelings so that, when they are physically punished, their owners can watch them shed "crocodile tears", is shocking.

This is a fantastic book and provides great food for thought. I loved the way english words and place names were given an African twist (the tube stations were fun to work out).

The only issue is that it isn't clear what era this is set in as there are several conflicting indicators. A great read though.

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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Blonde Roots is brilliant! 4 Aug 2008

By David No Relation

Format:Hardcover

This really is a wonderful book. If a better one is published this year, I'll be amazed. It's got everything: a story that builds and builds so that you can't wait to know what happens next; characters so vividly realised that you feel you know each of them personally and care desperately about what happens to them; an incredible amount of humour, even though its subject matter is far from trivial; and an awareness and understanding of how people behave that challenges and changes how you think. A book about slavery that is funny, lively, makes you cry and provides a completely different slant on what being "black" and "white" actually means - I never thought it could or would be written!

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor quality uninspired narrative that disappoints all round 27 Dec 2011

By Praslinoise

Format:Paperback

I was so surprised by the number of positive reviews for this book that I felt obliged to post a review. Previous comments have adequately summarised the premise of the novel, which in itself is an interesting and thought-provoking one. However, I found the execution of this to be truly awful. The detail is cliched and so full of inconsistencies as to be thoroughly distracting - it is completely unclear what era the story is set in, and historical markers are completely mixed up - references suggest 19th century one minute and post-modern era the next (e.g. horse-back riding, no electricity and old fashioned seafaring methods are juxtaposed with a disused underground system and references to 20th century television programmes). Truly bizarre! Descriptions of people rely on unimaginative current racial stereotypes (thick lips, flaring nostrils, huge bums) - simplistic inversions that are unconvincing in the context of the novel, as are the dialects that are rooted in modern day patois and british urban 'street' language...how exactly does that work? The resultant creation is lazy and laughable (for all the wrong reasons). At times I could imagine a teenager creating something more believable for a classroom literary assignment and I had to check twice that the book hadn't actually been written specifically with a young teenage audience in mind... which wouldn't have improved it!
The parts of the narrative that do pick up pace and have more substance, such as descriptions of conditions aboard the slave ship, read like paraphrased sections of writing from publications such as 'The Book of Negroes' or 'The Long Song' - fabulous examples of well-researched prose if you need some.
Overall, the concept is a good one and could have made for a wonderful piece of fiction.... Read more ›

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› See all 20 customer reviews (newest first) on Amazon.co.uk

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› Go to Amazon.com to see all 22 reviews 3.5 out of 5 stars

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Original idea, standard genre story

Nearer 3.5 stars really.

This was a little like the idea behind 'Noughts and Crosses': the subversion of history to make a point and shock. Read more

Published 1 month ago by K. J. Noyes

2.0 out of 5 stars A bit disappointing.

I found this book a bit confusing to be honest. Mixing up historical and current culture left me wondering where we were. Read more

Published 13 months ago by D. R. QUINN

4.0 out of 5 stars Captivated, intrigued, entertained, shocked and appalled throughout

I heard about this book a few years ago on the BBC World Service; earlier this year I stumbled across a copy and grabbed it. And I was not disappointed. Read more

Published on 18 Jun 2010 by I. Holder

5.0 out of 5 stars Blonde ambition

Blonde Roots is a sharp satirical novel which revolves around the fascinating conceit of a world where Africans perpetrated the slave trade on Europeans rather than the other way... Read more

Published on 18 Feb 2010 by Oracle

4.0 out of 5 stars A clever, readable and thought-provoking 'what if' novel

In Blonde Roots we are introduced to an alternative reality, where black Africans from the kingdom of Ambossa have colonised the new world and shipped over enslaved 'backwards'... Read more

Published on 9 Feb 2010 by BookWorm

4.0 out of 5 stars Very creative, well-thought history lesson

Very enoyable little book that provides a different way of looking at the appaling treatment of Africa and Africans by the west in the last few hundred years. Read more

Published on 11 Jan 2010 by Z. Anthony

4.0 out of 5 stars Slavery - Upside Down

The horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade that brought so many Africans to the Western Hemisphere has been the subject of innumerable scholarly articles, books, and histories, as... Read more

Published on 12 Dec 2009 by A. Ross

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating idea - mixed execution...disappointed.

Brilliant idea which starts strongly. However it suffers from a lack of follow-through and seems to lose steam about a third of the way through the novel. Read more

Published on 16 Oct 2009 by DaisyBelle

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave and spellbinding work

I read this book in two sittings as I found it so hard to put it down. Not only does it have a thrilling story line, it is also devastating and subversive in the most compelling... Read more

Published on 8 Sep 2009 by KemKem

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow

Have you ever heard of a book you really wanted? The topic wasn't one that you were especially drawn to and it wasn't the usual type of thing you read, but something about it... Read more

Published on 5 July 2009 by Anna

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