Book reviews by melodymagickitchencom

The Book Of Negroes

by Lawrence Hill

Aminita will be a character burned onto your heart forever. The main character of "The Book of Negroes" (printed in the US as "Someone Knows My Name") is a strong,heroic woman. Her history will touch you and leave you changed.The book is based on a little-known document, the book of negroes, which recorded names and descriptions of 3,000 African-American slaves who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution and were evacuated by the British by ship to points in Nova Scotia as freedmen.The story itself revolves around Aminita, from her childhood in a African village to her status as revered but misunderstood symbol of abolition. The book is unstoppable reading, simply hard to put down. You travel step-by-step with Aminita, and the journey is harrowing, joyful and ultimately so worthwhile. Here is an excerpt, a small sample of Mr. Hill's evocative writing."Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, Dear Reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel?"

Dominance

by Will Lavender

What a ride! The tale takes place in the past and the present, passing the two stories back and forth easily. There are of course many similarities in the stories, and both star the intelligent Alex and the sinister but even more intelligent Richard Aldiss, her mentor and teacher.In the past she takes his night class and works on a puzzle to exonerate her professor of the murder charges that keep him in prison. The night class is taught by Richard from prison, making those scenes very tense and mysterious.In the present her old classmates join her to mourn the death of one of their own. And the mystery continues, as the now free but still creepy Dr. Aldiss insists that someone from the night class committed the murder.Well-written and fast-paced, it's an intelligent mystery. As the book goes on, the chapters get shorter and shorter, creating a sense of urgency as Alex is in danger in both the past and present.I would recommend the novel highly.