"Some white man jaw drop with outrage but sooner or later a black apple pass by and they can't resist." i have to admit that i don't often like stories with main female characters or voices written by men, but james really does something remarkable here.
and of the narration - it's in dialect, which also makes this hard to read, although of course that gets easier as you go on. (there's no reason to further traumatize people of color, who already intimately know this history.) the narrator's voice is such a strong one to bring us this history. at times it's really hard to bear, but it's so important to voice this history and this truth, and for white people to listen and hold it. There is so much detail of the violence (physical and sexual) that goes on. (for example, the quilt of scars (from whipping) on the backs of homer and lilith.) some of the language used to describe such atrocities is strangely beautiful. There are so many strong women in this, in their individuality, in their sisterhood, in their strength. i wish i had time to read it slowly, because i'm sure i missed stuff there are so many layers and there is so much going on here. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to recently grace the page-and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most suspenseful, satisfying mysteries.The real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once wholly in command of his craft and breathtakingly daring, spinning his magical web of humanity, race, and love, fully inhabiting the incredibly rich nineteenth-century Jamaican patois that rings with a distinctly contemporary energy.Between 4.5 and 5 stars.
Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all.
The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been conspiring to stage a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to and-as she reveals the extent of her power and begins to understand her own desires and feelings-potentially the weak link in their plans.Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion- between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith is born into slavery, and even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they-and she- will come to both revere and fear. From a young writer who radiates charisma and talent comes a sweeping, stylish historical novel of Jamaican slavery that can be compared only to Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel-a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling-that tells the story of a young slave woman on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealing a world and a culture that is both familiar and entirely new.
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