It doesn’t shed any new light once you’ve got used to it, as you quickly do. It’s described in enough detail to be revolting, but not so much to make it unsuitable for an older YA audience. The types of brutality are many and varied, but nothing I’ve not heard of before. There are kidnaps, punishments, escapes, rapes, revenge, appalling living conditions, love, separations, reunions, sacrifice, and more. (Evaristo is a British woman with a Nigerian father.) Here, the slave trade is reversed, with blak Aphrikans capturing, selling, and enslaving whyte Europanes to work on distant plantations. The concept of reversal/recasting is fine, though hardly original (see Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor's Tale, serialised from 1980, Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses of 2001, and arguably Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels of 1726, plus the title being a nod to Alex Haley Roots: The Saga of an American Family of 1976). Not because it’s the raw, brilliantly creative, and insightful tale of a woman’s experience of slavery I expected, but because I adored Girl, Woman, Other (see my review HERE), and I found nothing of merit in this - not even allowing for its being written 12 years ago (2008), as satire that borders YA.
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