THE LONG SONG by ANDREA LEVY

Right. Bear with me. This is a difficult one to review. The reason for that is because at times I really disliked this book - worse: I found it boring. However, at other times I was completely gripped and in love with the characters and their journeys.

Sigh.

Alas, my overall reading experience was not a positive one. I wanted to DNF many times but my enjoyment of the “good bits” prevented me from doing so.

So, the story is about Jamaica slightly before, during and after the end of slavery. The main character is July and she is the daughter of a slave and a white man; the product of rape. She works for an Englishman and his sister in their plantation house.

Alongside that storyline, we have the present day, wherein a woman named July is writing this story under the watchful eye of her son Thomas. I found that Thomas was an irrelevant character in the present day as was the entire present-day storyline. Maybe I missed the point.

What I found interesting was learning about slavery in Jamaica. I also found interesting, as I always do in literature, human nature. Racism has always baffled me. I remember learning about Martin Luther King as a child and being completely flabbergasted that people could be treated differently because of how they look. I never understood it. I still don’t really. But since then I have read as much as I could to try understand what it is about us humans that makes us behave this way. This book does shine a light on some of that. And mostly the answer is fear. Isn’t that what motivates most of our hideous actions?

Well, you can probably see how perplexed I am. I rarely write long reviews. I can normally tell you straight away what I love or dislike about a book, but this one is troubling. I think it had all the ingredients to be my favourite but it didn’t quite work for me. But why? Is it because the story wasn’t as predictable as I was expecting? I don’t know. I think I’ll go and eat some breakfast and see if that helps to unscramble my thoughts.
Has anyone else read this book and had a similar or completely different experience? Let me know! It might help!

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