A review by amphipodgirl
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

adventurous fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This is a hard one to rate. It was written in 1885 by a white Englishman who had worked in the colonizing force in southern Africa, and it is just as racist, sexist, imperialist, and colonialist as that would lead you to expect. He just has no respect for people of African descent or the cultures of Africa, and when one of them does get a compliment it is extremely back-handed. But it's a compelling adventure tale, and the writing is much more straightforward than I expected -- I had braced myself for Dickensian levels of sentence complexity, and it's a lot more modern-feeling than that.
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