Book No. 93 of 2020
Reading this book is like putting together a puzzle without a guide—Card tells each chapter from a different perspective and time period, and over the course of the story you as the reader make connections via characters, until you’re left admiring the complex, multilayered saga that Card has woven.
One of the book’s major themes is that of generational trauma, and how Western culture is so fundamentally built on colonialism and slavery that our painful history can’t be divorced from our modern narrative. The pain and injustice inflicted on a female slave on a Jamaican plantation are echoed, generations later, in her descendants in 2020 NYC, and families are bound by their trauma and emotional baggage just as much as their blood. Card mixes narrative techniques to create the sense of a story constructed with multiple voices and perspectives. While the bulk of the book hews to modern reality, the story is framed with elements of the afterlife and the supernatural, giving the whole thing a more haunting, layered feel.
I was generally impressed with how Card shifts styles and perspectives (using first, second, and third person in singular and plural), but I do have one minor complaint: one chapter is presented as a series of letters written in 1832, but it scanned to me as being way too modern in tone. It read like 21st cent. historical YA (contemporary language and syntax with period expressions sprinkled in) which was altogether too jarring for me to suspend disbelief and get fully immersed in that part of the story, which is both the longest chapter and one of the most crucial building blocks in the narrative.
Similar Reads
The multigenerational narrative and its themes reminded me of Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift.
The reframing of history through suppressed voices reminded me of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Téa Obreht’s Inland, and C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold.
The mixed perspective writing reminded me of Tommy Orange’s There There.
Also, a passing line was very evocative of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.