skygiants: a figure in white and a figure in red stand in a courtyard in front of a looming cathedral (cour des miracles)
I've read at least one book before with the general premise of "let's reverse the historical direction of black/white colonization and slavery and see what happens!" and I'm generally aware of several more. I think it's a valuable idea to read about, but the problem with historical AUs in general is that too much of the time they get bogged down in the kind of logic-puzzles of counterfactual history - you know, where the author is like "look, I snuck in counterfactual Da Vinci, aren't I clever!" and you're like "yes, but counterfactual Da Vinci would probably never have been born," like that - and I find that kind of thing more jarring in serious and thought-provoking AUs than I do in, say, NAPOLEONIC WARS WITH DRAGONS, which you can only take so seriously anyway.

Anyway, my actual point is that I just read Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, a what-if-slavery-was-reversed alternate history that just leapfrogs over all the problems of being an AU history by creating a completely satirical, deliberately anachronistic universe. Counterfactual worldbuilding is not the point of this book, and I actually think this works much better for the premise; it's definitely the best take on it I've read. Because you don't have to get jarred out when the worldbuilding doesn't make sense. You just sort of acclimate early on to the fact that the book has Europeans enslaved in African households in an alternate version of nineteenth-century plantations, and at the same time white slaves on Haiti are rebelling, and at the same time teens are zooming to raves on their skateboards and Doris Scagglethorpe, our protagonist slave, is complaining about how notions of beauty are shaped by Afro-haired Barbie dolls that all the little girls play with, and then you can start to appreciate what Evaristo is doing. It's all the consequences of slavery and privilege being skewered at once, and the way she uses contemporary culture to do it means that even though the skin-tones and ethnicities are reversed, no one is actually let off the hook, even for the span of the book.

Sometimes Evaristo gets a bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, given the number of reviews I see on Amazon that completely miss the point, I'm not sure I can complain about that - and many other times it's sharp and clever, and often hilarious, in a harsh sort of way. Other times it's unabashedly brutal, as slave narratives inevitably are. The shifts in tone can be startling, but she does a good job balancing the two, and I don't think the book would be complete without both.
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (twirly)
So I have mildly conflicted feelings on Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe.

On the one hand, I really enjoyed it! The book is a novel-in-verse, told by Zuleika, a Londinium girl and the daughter of Sudanese immigrants who is married off at an (extremely) young age to a wealthy Roman businessman. The voice is the strong point here; Zuleika is young, urban, and super-chic, and the author does a really good job of sliding in between historical fact and deliberate anachronism to get the feel across of a bustling and up-and-coming Londinium. It shouldn't work to have Zuleika tossing off references to her Armani togas, but it totally does because Evaristo is really smart about how and where she does it. The novel-in-verse thing works too because Zuleika is an aspiring poet, though it's never quite clear exactly how much talent she has (which, naturally, I love). And I appreciated that the most important relationship in the book, in the end, is between Zuleika and her best friend Alba as opposed to the Great Romance.

So why the conflicted feelings? Well, first of all, after seeing someone comment somewhere on the ridiculous number of books that are titled things like The _____'s Wife, I have a kneejerk reaction against the title despite the fact that otherwise I find it awesome! Also, for a book told by the female narrator and with several other strong female (or female-ish) characters, it really should not have been so hard for it to pass the Bechdel Test. (It does, eventually! It just . . . takes a while.)

However, it was definitely a fun read, and I think I want to try more books by this author!

IN OTHER NEWS: I am going to NY ComicCon on Saturday! \o/ (And possibly Sunday as well, we will see.) I am super excited! I mean, slightly unnerved, because, GIANT CON, but super excited also!

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