The Pox Party

I'm a little in-between on this book. One the one hand, it is beautifully written and it's easily seen why it has won the awards it has. The characters are well developed and their language used is dead on with the historical era the book takes place in. However, it was hard to focus on it... it never really grabbed my attention and held on. Towards the middle of the book, I merely continued reading because of the beautiful word choice and language (hoping I would maybe catch on in my own speech) but it was a rather boring book. I would still recommend it to older teens and adults.

This is hard to rate/review since it's the first part of a full story and definitely ends that way. I'll read the second part at some point, but not right away.

Parts of this were really interesting and read easily. Other parts didn't. That's sort of my fault - I knew when it was set so should have expected the war to come in in a big way, but... I don't enjoy war books. And then one whole section was letters, which I don't care for either.

But it was really just the one part that got long for me (and it was the shortest part!). The first two parts had ups and downs but were ultimately interesting and kept me reading. The fourth part as well.

I don't really feel like this is a YA book either, and except for Octavian's age I don't think it should be. But I expected a more YA story and I think that was part of my issue as well - it just wasn't what I wanted at the time.

Overall it was very good and Anderson's language is gorgeous, but it wasn't the right book for me at the moment. I will read part two when I'm in the mood for this sort of book.

I don't quite know what to make of this book. Here's a quick summary: A young pregnant woman is captured in Africa and taken to America in the early days of settlement. Rather than making her a slave, however, both she and her son become the subjects of a long term experiment. The experiment is begun to discover whether blacks given exemplary educations could compete with whites. The experiment comes to a halt, however, when the chief benefactor dies and is replaced by Southern slave holders who have a different agenda. There are other elements – the Revolutionary War, an experiment with smallpox, some of the stranger aspects of the experiment including measuring and recording excrement. I found it a compelling read, but could never put it into my school library.

Summary: This novel is part one of two. It centers on a young boy who has been enslaved. He has been raised in relative luxury and has been studied by his enslaver and his enslaver's friends as a scientific experiment. As the story progresses, Octavian begins to be more curious about what it would be like to be free.

I never got around to reading this before even though I've loved all of MTA's other stuff! Is it partly because the cover is bad? Yes.

Anyway in classic MT Anderson fashion, this is a fucking bonkers premise, intriguingly executed. It took me a little while to get into it, but once I was in........I was in, and truly devastated by Octavian's journey, as well as those of his fellow slaves.