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Jul 04, 2011floy rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
I was utterly enthralled by this book initially; I was enamored of the language and deeply invested in the story about the people aboard a slave ship in the 1700s. Alas, at some point after the middle of the book, the author lost me. He skipped ahead in time when I was so invested in the time in which he had put me. The reliance in the later chapters on pidgin English was wearisome and offensive. The famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave but his English was grammatically correct and as elegant as it was powerful. The idea that the white men and the Africans could only communicate by all sides using pidgin English was irritating, demeaning and distracting. I wish the author had done it differently because before that the book had me by the heart.