The Book of Hope

The Book of Negroes


Author:
Lawrence Hill

Published: HarperCollins Publishers 2007

Number of pages: 384

Review: “Sir Hastings presents me with a new quill and a glass inkpot decorated with swirling lines of indigo blue. I love the smoothness and the heft in my hand. I rub the surface but the indigo is buried deep in the glass. Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.”  The sheer brilliance of Lawrence Hill’s writing cannot even begin to be summed up by this one quotation alone. The entire novel is renowned and transcendent, and truly one of the best female voices I’ve read in a long time.

The story follows Aminata Diallo, a young Muslim woman born in Africa, who finds her world completely thrown into chaos when a group of men come into her village and sets her on the path to America.  Where the country is the land of opportunities for white settlers, it is the country of damnation and hell for the Africans.  As she grows older she learns from the people around her and fights to survive in the country that condemns her as the lowest of the human species.  Through her struggles you feel hope, sense loss and see victories, and never once do you question the fact that the narration is larger than life. Her heroism sets forth an unforgettable epic into a history of which many people are ignorant or choose to ignore.  Like the notable characters of Anna Karenina, Scarlett O’Hara, and Offred the handmaid, Aminata Diallo is timeless, relatable and authentic. 

Hill’s narration is preeminent within literature. Like Wally Lamb’s She Comes Undone, and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, Hill was able to capture the essence of a woman and form a character that was nothing short of real. The narration was so believable, I forgot the novel was written by a man. The character was completely and utterly genuine.  Hill also didn’t glorify Canada as do many novels about slavery; in fact it showed Canada as being as bad as the Americans.  Canadians were racist towards those who managed to escape from slavery and just because the slaves were free, doesn’t mean they were respected. 

I enjoyed every syllable of this novel. It is truly a masterpiece of historical fiction and places Hill among the great storytellers like Edward P. Jones, Margaret Attwood and Diana Gabaldon. I recommend this book to everyone who asks me “what book should I read?” which is a question I get often. Don’t miss out, trust me, you’ll love The Book of Negroes.

Happy Reading!!!