Blonde Roots: From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

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The world of Blonde Roots, in which young Doris Scagglethorpe (known by her slave name of Omorenomwara) must attempt to escape from her master if she hopes to see her family again, is not a straightforward parallel of the 18th-century landscape of the slave trade’s heyday. Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south east London, the fourth of eight children, to an English mother and Nigerian father.

In Book Two Evaristo tells the story of the exploitation of people and land from the perspective of the exploiter, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba. I was attracted to this particular book by it's premise which was, of course, also at the core of the wonderful Malorie Blackman books.Evaristo's premise is to describe the history of a slave, her family and her owners, with the twist that the roles of Britain and West Africa reversed. There were some technologies of our modern world they seemed to have, but not others so I felt a bit lost trying to figure out where and when to place this in my mind.

I felt so unbelievably uncomfortable reading it, there was no point or intelligence behind the decision to reverse the slave trade - all the message seemed to be was poor whites look how mean black people are? His responses range from a greater determination to enslave to the creation of the `International Society for the Suppression of Savage Beliefs and Customs' (p. singing music hall songs about being lazy, lying, conniving, cowardly, ignorant, sexually repressed buffoons. Evaristo has even reversed the dialects, forcing us to struggle with the plantation whytes' thick patois the way we have to wade through the Nigger Jim's speech in Huck Finn: "Sundays him carve tings fe folk in de quarter an don't charge nuttin but just aks to join famlees fer dinner.The slave raiders, it seemed, were in cahoots with aristocrats like Percy and the middlemen who supplied them with slaves for shipment overseas.