Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - The Book Of Echoes

The Book of Echoes by Rosanna Amaka 🌞 ad/ gifted products featured
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Today is my stop on the blog tour for @rosannaamaka’s debut novel #TheBookofEchoes, out 1st July! Thank you @izz.reading @doubledayukbooks for my gifted copy!
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🌓 The plot: Narrated by the spirit of an enslaved woman who died in London’s docks, The Book of Echoes is the story of Michael and Ngozi, a boy from Brixton and a girl from Obowi, Nigeria. They each grapple with generational trauma and the violence they experience in their own lives, juggling obligations to their families with their own desires to make something of themselves, to break out from under the long shadow of the past.
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I love a good ghostly narrator! It provides a perspective that’s only possible in fiction - the ability to find the improbable links between characters, to illuminate the roads not taken or the forgotten corners of history. It was used to great effect here, as it not only allowed exploration of sweeping themes like gentrification and generational trauma, but also helped to link the two halves of the novel through the faith you have in the narrator’s perspective, your trust that she will bring these stories together. I don’t think I’ve read a novel that hammers home so clearly how Britain’s colonial past echoes into the present day, and I loved that about this book!
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In terms of the characters, I loved both Michael and Ngozi equally, though I think I was so invested in them each individually that I found the eventual meeting of their narratives slightly underwhelming. Grief and loss are strong themes in this novel and Amaka deals with them well, and this book also had maybe my favourite character description I’ve read in ages: “she looked thrown together like a midnight sandwich” 🥪
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🌜Read it if you loved Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, as this is very similar but set in Britain/Nigeria rather than the US/Ghana, or if you read Black and British by David Olusoga and want to read novels that deal with the topics addressed there - I felt like B&B provided so much of the context for this book!
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🚫 Avoid it if you are avoiding stories about parental death, murder, rape, racism, violence, or police brutality.

Content Warnings

krilves's review

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dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book didn't instantly grab me - actually at first, I wasn't even sure that I liked it. I wasn't keen on the narrative style and the jumps in time and location, but over time the book became absolutely engrossing. It's possible that my initial dislike was actually just subconscious racism and I'll own that (I know that this is an actual barrier of entry for Black people to get published in the first place; white editors will reject their stories on basis of "didn't grab me", "I couldn't relate" etc. it's more complex than I'm staying here but for brevity let's leave it at that, so I was already aware before reading this book that this is a bias I may have to overcome, and that I now think I definitely need to be more conscious of).

So anyway, the book did become absolutely engrossing to me, as I got used to the style and as I realised, on a literary level, what the author was doing and why she chose this narrative framing. It's not just clever: it tells a richer story.

This book was sold to me as a warm-hearted story about survival. I don't think I agree - I mean, it's not *wrong*, but what I think this story is about at its core is healing. There is a lot of pain in this book, but ultimately the story is about healing from that pain. The narrative frame weaves together the story of a young woman stolen away into slavery, the story of a young woman of a lower-class status growing up in Nigeria and trying to build a better life for herself and her family, and the story of a young man of Jamaican descent growing up in Brixton and also trying to build a better life for himself and his family. What unites the three of them is the pain and generational trauma of slavery (and no punches are pulled - I especially appreciated the inclusion of Scottish slave owners as this is something I've only recently learned about) but also the love and kindness and willingness to open up and shed fears that eventually heals them. It is heavily implied that Ngozi and Michael are descendants of the young woman who narrates the book, and that them finding each other is a part of the healing process from the trauma they and their ancestors have suffered at the hands of white men. At the same time their story is a kind of parable - this book cautions and encourages and preaches, from a place of love and hope and despair, that the way forward, the path to healing, is through finding and supporting and loving one another. To be clear, this message is aimed at Black people, not us white folks.

In the end, this is a beautiful book. I cried at the end.

Content Warnings

voelve's review

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I've never seen her do that before. I mean, look deep into her eyes to see herself inside.

This book is horrifying. Not the writing, but the subject material. The topic of inter-generational trauma is something I'm trying to learn how to - understand is the wrong word, but at least be aware of as a white person. I think I'll need to digest this one for a little while before I pick up another book on the subject, though; I had to put it down a couple of times because there were some deeply troubling passages.

The only thing I didn't find appealing (if you can use that word about an unsettling book such as this) was the choice of the narrator. I really liked the choice of using a poor slave's spirit as an omniscient narrator; it was particularly spellbinding as the intro to the book, but about halfway through (and more so towards the end of the book), I felt that it removed focus from the stories of the two protagonists.

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