The second section is Chief Kaga Konata Katamba’s tracts, describing how he became wealthy trading slaves, and justifying the trade.
In the first section, Doris Scagglethorpe tells of her childhood, which was broadly happy, though poor (a cabbage-farming family of serfs) and how, aged 10, she was captured, enslaved, transported, and renamed Omorenomwara. Does the glorious sunset diminish the horror, or does the disconnect with the drowning slaves make the horror more real? ( Source.) It looks beautiful at first, but actually shows slavers throwing the dead and dying overboard as a typhoon approaches.
Image: “The Slave Ship”, by JMW Turner in 1840. The main plot points were too predictable and I never believed in the world or characters enough to find it exciting or to really care. 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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