A review by rachelleahdorn
A Free State by Tom Piazza
3.0
I just finished this book and I'm not sure what I think. It was very much not what I expected. I thought it was going to be about the "free state" of Jones in the civil war. But that's my own fault for not reading the synopsis more carefully.
The book was well written and was mostly told from the unusual perspective--at least one I hadn't read before--of a white man in a minstrel show in the north before the civil war. Parts of the story were also told from the point of view of a runaway slave (before and after he ran), a disgustingly nasty runaway slave hunter, and, at the end, William Seward, the real-life US Senator and abolitionist.
What I liked about the book was that it illustrated an unfamiliar time and from an unfamiliar perspective. However, I had a strange feeling throughout the book because the author kept tossing in the racist/racially aware misgivings of the minstrel show performer narrator --this seemed too pat a solution to portraying a story from the perspective of a guy participating in a nasty and today almost unbelievably offensive performance. It seemed that since the author was dealing with a unpleasant subject and a distasteful profession, he tried to make it "ok" by showing us the narrator was really a good guy hanging with a bad crowd.
The characters in general were too much their archetypes. We had an above-average, heroic, intelligent, well-read, and multi-talented escaped slave, a disgusting, revolting, inhuman slave hunter guy, and the main narrator, right in the middle, kind of deciding how to behave in the world. Except no one really got to do much self-discovery in the book and the bad guys stayed bad, the good stayed good and the mediocre was also present at the end of the story.
I'm not sure stationary character types are enough of a reason for not wholly enjoying the book, but there you go. It was unpleasant reading about the slave hunter, so maybe that colors my opinion as well.
If you are curious about minstrelsy in the antebellum north and don't want non-fiction, try this book, see what you think and I'd be curious to read your review.
I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway.
The book was well written and was mostly told from the unusual perspective--at least one I hadn't read before--of a white man in a minstrel show in the north before the civil war. Parts of the story were also told from the point of view of a runaway slave (before and after he ran), a disgustingly nasty runaway slave hunter, and, at the end, William Seward, the real-life US Senator and abolitionist.
What I liked about the book was that it illustrated an unfamiliar time and from an unfamiliar perspective. However, I had a strange feeling throughout the book because the author kept tossing in the racist/racially aware misgivings of the minstrel show performer narrator --this seemed too pat a solution to portraying a story from the perspective of a guy participating in a nasty and today almost unbelievably offensive performance. It seemed that since the author was dealing with a unpleasant subject and a distasteful profession, he tried to make it "ok" by showing us the narrator was really a good guy hanging with a bad crowd.
The characters in general were too much their archetypes. We had an above-average, heroic, intelligent, well-read, and multi-talented escaped slave, a disgusting, revolting, inhuman slave hunter guy, and the main narrator, right in the middle, kind of deciding how to behave in the world. Except no one really got to do much self-discovery in the book and the bad guys stayed bad, the good stayed good and the mediocre was also present at the end of the story.
I'm not sure stationary character types are enough of a reason for not wholly enjoying the book, but there you go. It was unpleasant reading about the slave hunter, so maybe that colors my opinion as well.
If you are curious about minstrelsy in the antebellum north and don't want non-fiction, try this book, see what you think and I'd be curious to read your review.
I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway.