Reviews tagging 'Violence'

Blake: or; The Huts of America by Floyd J. Miller, Martin R. Delany

1 review

jade's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging emotional informative sad tense medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

A slave, Henry, attempts to rescue his wife who is sold from the plantation they both work on and in doing so, becomes a leader of a slave uprising across the American South and later in the book, in Cuba. Henry travels to each plantation, putting his life at risk in doing so to hear the conditions each slave is facing and to give instructions on how to rise against the slave owners. It's harrowing to read and footnotes indicate where a story is true. There are some beautifully written lines about being free, and there are heartbreaking lines on what the slaves are enduring. 

This was the first book I read for the Crash Course in the history of Black SFF and I get it. It one of the first alternate history Sci-Fi's where it reimagines a world in which the slaves did rise up and free themselves from the shackles of oppression. The world may look a lot different if this indeed did happen. 

The edition I read was the 1970s edition, so it didn't contain the addition of the ending a historian added in 2017. I didn't mind not having the ending though, it let me imagine what could be. It is suspected that as this book was written in serialised form, the edition from the May 1862 magazine may have contained the ending but there are no existing copies to ever have proved this. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings