Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Swing Time

I think if you go into this book looking for a main character you can root for, you're going to be dissapointed. Because the main character definitely has some of her own personality and complexity, but where she as the narrator and the book really shine is her (and Zadie Smith's) sociological observations about race, class, and colonialism in modern day Britain (or arguably modern-day Western countries as a whole). Zadie Smith has a lot of insightful observations about these topics and uses this novel and its characters to explore those themes. The novel is the strongest when those observations are tied to the deeply personal, the main character's direct relationships with Tracey, her mother and father, and Hawa. The novel started off strong with the exploration of the close, personal, and tempetuous relationship between Tracey and the narrator. The relationship between the two illustrated deep tensions created by differences in economic, social, and cultural capital between two young girls who on the surface should be very similar. However, the latter part of the middle of the novel begain to drag a bit for me when the narration got too far abstracted from these relationships, but the ending really picked up for me again as the main character returns to those relationships in the beginning that initially drove the story so successfully.

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nytephoenyx's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This is the first time I’ve read a Zadie Smith book, and her writing immediately transported me. Swing Time tells the story of two girls who were friends when they were young, loved to dance, and took very different paths as they grew up and grew apart. The story jumps between time periods and continents, but the voice remains the same.

I found Swing Time to be a pendulum between states. Famous, unsuccessful. Comfortable, poor. Intellectual, cosmopolitan. Natural talent, hard work. Throughout the entire book, our unnamed narrator finds herself confused and learning. The world itself never seems to fit in the box she has built in her mind to fit it and as such the alternating chapters between Aimee and Tracey are in many ways repetitive, just from a slightly different perspective.

One thing I will criticize is that Swing Time feels… excessively wordy. Despite what a wonderful job narrator Pippa Bennett-Warner did with this book, I still had to play it back on 2x because otherwise I found my mind wandering. Each section is beautifully written, but with hours of material just like this, it’s easy to get fatigued by the philosophical ponderings, socio-economic lectures, and bemused conversation.

Like most literary fiction, this book explores the world. Smith’s writing is stunning and immersive despite its repetitive nature and wordiness. I enjoyed the slow transformation of not just our narrator, but Aimee and Tracey as well. Swing Time is a good book to pick up if you’re looking for something slow but interesting that is well-written and raw, though not abrasively so. I enjoyed it enough that I will pick up more of Smith’s work.

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jadams89's review against another edition

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challenging emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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bookedbymadeline's review

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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