I read the Audible version of this book but as that isn’t listed on GoodReads my review is posted here. It took me a long time to get through this one for a variety of reasons but ultimately I’m leaving a scant five-star rating.

I’m impressed with the scope of this book. Rarely does a book that spans so many years - from Aminata’s abduction from her homeland at age eleven, to her old age more than fifty years later - manage to still feel personal and warm.

What comes through most in The Book of Negroes is not the slave trade but the resilience of those subjected to it. The slaves led rich, loving, complex lives in terrible conditions. The Book of Negroes is uncompromising in its descriptions of the horrors of treating people like animals, or worse, yet it manages to weave that seamlessly into the narrative. It is too easy for a book like this to become a “social issues” fable and preach. Instead, we learn by coming to love Aminata and ache for her losses and celebrate with her triumphs.

This is not a happy book. But it is a redemptive book.

As a personal preference, I struggled with the amount of sensing that there was little real hope of things to improve for the character. But Aminata herself almost never loses hope - this is more of a meta feeling in a literary sense, of impending doom, because it seems it would fit with the narrative. She stumbles from problem to problem, but there is always a sense of forward progress, of seeking, of hope.

On a practical level, I learned a LOT: the story of the Black Loyalists. The first successful British colony is Africa. The complicity of Africans in the slave trade. Black history in Nova Scotia. The arguments people made for the slave trade. Some of the different ways that slaves were involved in the economy and different industries they participated in. I never felt like it was shoved down my throat, so I would recommend this book to Canadians, Americans, and British especially. To anybody able to handle an adult level of tragedy who wants a good story - and maybe to learn something.

The Book of Negroes - Likewise Book Reviews

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