Will I love Washington Black?

I loved this book because the writing is stunning and the plotline is fresh and sucked me in. Edugyan takes the typical slave narrative and opens it up, creating something new, enlightening, and, ultimately, beautiful.

Set on the beautiful island of Barbados, Edugyan’s take on the slavery/emancipation interface focuses on primary characters that are male. The relationship between two of them, one White and one Black, becomes an exploration of how slavery created a toxic psychological legacy that distorted the nature and possibilities of friendship and trust.  

I’ve loved Barbados since my first visit as a teenager, and I became more attached after some of my siblings called it home. Known as ‘Little England,’ a downside of this sunny paradise, and a relic of slavery, is its unequal economic and social class divisions. The population… show more.

An eleven-year-old slave boy on a brutal Barbados sugar cane plantation is apprenticed to an 1800s man of science.  They embark on a globe-spanning adventure together. Esi Edugyan takes all that’s best about a Victorian adventure novel—characters that are kindly, eccentric, detestable, the rich mannered language, the sense of romantic wonder—and channels it into Washington Black with a modern efficiency and a layered awareness of race and privilege.