50books_poc | Blonde Roots & Beacon Hill Boys (Reply)

Bernardine Evaristo "Blonde Roots" - 2/5

Doris Scagglethorpe, the daughter of a cabbage farmer, was ten years old when she's captured by slavers. Now twenty years later, she's trying to escape.

This is an interesting premise. Blacks (or blaks, as they are inexplicably called in the book (more on that later)) are the dominant race and whites (whytes) are the ones enslaved. It's not an alternate history, nor is it a fantasy set in another world. I'm not really sure what it is, or what it wants to be, and that was the problem for me.

To start with, from the very first page it seems like the author has just gone through and done a search and replace, like the blaks celebrating Voodoomas as their main holiday, or whytes being derogatively referred to as wiggers. Neither of these make sense! Wigger can only exist as a word if nigger exists, which of course it doesn't in this universe. And why would their celebration be Christmas with "voodoo" pasted on? (The suffix mas comes from mass!) The book is full of stuff like this and it made my head hurt at least once every page or so.

The other eye-twitchy, headache inducing thing was the world. It's sort of kind of our world, except geography is randomly different (and I don't mean place names, but actual continents and stuff are not the same shape). Stuff is randomly spelled oddly, like whytes and blaks. It makes no sense at all. There's also the technology and...culture, I guess. Like, it's historical mixed with modern. They have carriages and ships, but there's also the Tube under London (Londolo). They have plantations and yet the kids shop at Hot Topic-esque boutiques. The fashions of the Europeans are from hundreds of years ago, yet Doris says that her physique, stick skinny so her bones show, is the height of beauty.

I just...don't like it! It's all done like a joke and so haphazard. It reads like the kind of fanfic that people label crack because they just want to toss in whatever they think is funny without a care for whether it makes sense to the story. I don't like that sort of fanfic, and I don't like it any better in this book. It just makes my brain go crazy and I can't enjoy the story because I'm getting irked by all the ridiculous inconsistencies every other page.

As for the story itself...it offered nothing new except the idea of the white/black switch, which I didn't find to be done well. If you've read any accounts of slavery, you won't find anything new or different here. It was a real disappointment.

Ken Mochizuki "Beacon Hill Boys" - 2/5

It's 1972 and Dan Inagaki is a pretty average kid, decent grades, but a bit of a slacker. Compared to his older brother, Brad, though, who's perfect at everything, Dan is a total loser, especially in the eyes of his family. They also don't like the way he stands up for himself and for Asian Americans in general, demanding Asian American history be taught in school and books about Asian Americans be added to the library. Better to keep your head down and avoid pissing people off.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. Most books about Japanese Americans are about WWII and/or the aftermath of the camps, so it's nice to have a book that's about something else. However, the writing is just not very good. It's not horrible, but just bad in that solidly mediocre way. The dialogue is the worst, not natural at all. I gather the author mostly writes picture books, and I think he should probably stick to that.

The story itself was decent enough, though, and kept my interest pretty well (the book is short and doesn't have a lot of text per page, so I zoomed through it). I'm definitely glad it exists to provide some variety in terms of Japanese-American lit, but I just really wish it were better written.

I especially liked this section, where Dan asks his history teacher if they can learn about the internment camps (which his own parents refuse to tell him about):

He peered at me over the tops of his bifocals and grunted, "I don't care about any Japanese history. We only teach American history around here."

But these camps happened in the US. And people in the camps were American citizens. Didn't that make it American history?

"Look, son, I have a few months to cover over two hundred years. I only cover what's important."

Ouch. The worst thing is knowing that while things have changed some, many people still do think like that. "Why should there be black history month?" ("Where is white history month!?") "Studying Native Americans/black Americans/Asian Americans/Mexican Americans/anyone other than whites is just political correctness gone wild!" There are still many people who think that if it didn't happen to white people (if it was something white people did to people of color), it's not important.

Also, for those who might be interested, I have reviews of The Taqwacores and The Story of a Marriage on my journal, both of which are about PoC, but by white authors. Both were really well-done, IMO.