Blonde Roots

By: Bernardine Evaristo

Narrated by: Charlotte Beaumont, Ben Arogundade

Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Imagine if the transatlantic slave trade was reversed.

Imagine Africans the masters and Europeans their slaves....

Now meet young Doris, living in a sleepy English cottage. One day she is kidnapped and put aboard a slave ship bound for the New World. On a strange tropical island, Doris is told she is an ugly, stupid savage. Her only purpose in life is to please her mistress. Then, as personal assistant to Bwana, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I, she sees the horrors of the sugarcane fields. Slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. But though she lives in chains, Doris dreams of escape - of returning home to England and those she loves....

©2020 Bernardine Evaristo (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic." (Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast)

"A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history. Evaristo keep[s] her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout." (Daily Telegraph)

"So human and real. Re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence." (Guardian)

Bafflingly pointless

I made a mistake. A friend recommended Bernardine Evaristo and I clearly should have started with something else, likely the always highlighted "Girl, Woman, Other" ... alas, I saw what Blonde Roots was about, and was instantly intrigued. The idea was promising, for sure: What if the whole world of slavery had been turned upside down, a complete reversal where black people ruled and white people were the slave race. What would such a world have looked like? How would it have been?

Turns out - exactly the same. Exactly. There was no point to this story. None. Everything you know about slavery is, in this book, just as you've known it to be. The abductions, the slave ships, the abuse, the plantations - every horrible truth. It's just that black people are the masters, the slave traders, the violators - and white people are the victims. If all's the same, what's the point? There was nothing new to tell, nothing that was different. The story gives us two points of view, that of a white female slave, her life and escapes, and that of a black leader/slaver, his life and views. Switch skin colors and it would have been a straight-forward tale of slavery times. As a story, it was decent - but I guess it only became something that stood out by switching races, and by attempting to be satirical and 'clever' with similar yet altered naming conventions (such as niggers are now called wiggers).

I was so ready to love this story ... there's nothing clever about Blonde Roots, it's simply a photographic negative of what really happened - and has been told many times in unforgettable ways - instead of this, read Alex Haley's Roots and spend real time with Kunta Kinte.