A review by sgunther
Clotel: Or, the President's Daughter by William Wells Brown

2.0

This book is a bit of a mess. To call it a novel would be a stretch, let's be honest—the many characters' stories barely overlap (titling it Clotel is excusable only because they are all related to her); Brown's use of apparently authentic newspaper excerpts is incongruous to the fictionality of the rest; and the accompanying anecdotes would do better in some kind of essay. But it is not uninteresting, and it is very telling of its time period in ways one wouldn't necessarily expect.