A review by velveteencactus
Swing Time by Zadie Smith

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

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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