A review by will___to___flower
Another Country by James Baldwin

2.0

I wanted to like this book mostly because I like Baldwin when I hear him speak, but this book is just so melodramatic and full of philosophical diatribes that make me yawn; extremely shallow for how many pages some of these diatribes can last. I understand Baldwin, you love being a poet, but this type of writing only works when you actually know how to write it. The word choice and the construction of the narrative is extremely lackluster, and the fact that I can’t read a single piece of dialog without it being interrupted with a “he said,” is just so mind-numbingly amateurish to me. The novel overall isn’t terrible, but it is written in such an impenetrably pretentious way that every time I came back to read it, I was rolling my eyes.