MixedWiredAnchored in the bare and elegiac prose Hamid has made his trademark style ... The transformation, of which Anders’ is the first—but not the only, and certainly not the last—elicits worthy exploration. What if whiteness were suddenly gone? Would the social order of life come undone? Would anything change? Where Hamid lands doesn’t exactly persuade ... The great staging of Hamid’s work is intimacy; the grooves of human attachment his sole preoccupation. He is among the foremost diviners of partnership: of friendships, lifetime loves, and shattered marriages ... Hamid is graceful in sewing empathy in the book’s closing pages; I’m much more cynical on the matter, much less hopeful that everything, in the end, would play out in such an unceremoniously tame manner ... For me, the change felt like a mirage, a device for the characters to speak through but one they never really accept. Whiteness physically recedes but it never vanishes completely. It has a psychological grip; lest we forget, identity is more than a badge of flesh. The newly \'dark people\' of Hamid’s epic appear to embrace different outlooks but, really, what has happened is more of a costume swap than an adjustment of the soul. The characters operate in a kind of cultural drag, entombed in an unrecognizable self, a sort of living elegy of their former whiteness. What was once marked as difference is not understood anew; instead, they continue to see through white eyes, in spite of their brown skin ... It’s all a bit of a puzzle, really. The aggressions of otherness linger; Anders and Oona are startled by a man one night as they leave dinner, succumbing to the very stereotype they seemingly project. What’s more, people of color are never afforded the privilege of insight at length ... That is primarily where the novel falls short: in what it chooses to catch sight of. Or rather, what it misses. There are minimal shifting points of view; it is motored by a monologue that, over time, suffers from claustrophobia, a confined and occasionally naive thought experiment ... Change isn’t impossible. That much is true. But the nature of societies and those who sit at the top, of people who hoard power and will do anything to protect it, even if they share the same complexion, seldom do.
Marlon James
PositiveWired... tests the reader\'s commitment ... James, a deft stylist with a taste for violence and grand revelation, is something like an orchestrator when it comes to inverting any expectations a reader might bring to his work. His symphonies are layered, pulse with heat, and spurn containment from all sides ... a journey so fat with adventure and emotional complexity it feels mythic in scope ... James doesn\'t entirely redraw fantasy\'s classic narrative elements here. Instead, he skillfully plays within their parameters, writing with an acrobatic sense of invention to create a story that feels fresh and lived-in. He infuses African history into a folkloric wonderland with the occasional trapdoor—a landscape dense with feeling and inevitable loss. By turns absorbing, messy, and affectingly sharp, Black Leopard, Red Wolf unfolds with a sustained hunger. It is a hero\'s tale soaked in blood ... the book reckons with sexuality and gender in thoughtful, studied strokes ... It is that same naked totality, that intense desire for personal truth, that makes Black Leopard, Red Wolf such a worthy read. It is a book that doesn\'t just rise to the moment but captures it ... for all of the book\'s technical and narrative brilliance, it falls victim to the gluttony of the genre ... But James mostly traverses that sprawl with the complexity of a classical portraitist: He sketches and paints and slathers depth onto a canvas of infinite possibilities, textures, and horrors. It is a history and a world richly and hauntingly imagined.
Timothy B. Tyson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe events of that bitter morning, their motivations and ramifications, have found a meticulous, if not their most exhaustive, retelling in Timothy B. Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till, an account of absorbing and sometimes horrific detail ... Black life in America has endured as little more than a fragile truth in the hands of white aggressors. And Tyson does well to remind us just how all-consuming racial terror can be when wielded with brute force.
