buggy 's review for:

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup

3.0

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This book was very impactful, and I reccomend anyone interested at all in the subject matter to read it. One thing that was easy for me to forget during my reading, was that this was not fiction or an exaggeration, but real events in this man's life. I have read other works of fiction that present far more painful pictures of slavery than that presented here, but they are fiction. This book should have been more painful as a direct retelling of events, but I continuously struggled to process the true weight, comparing constantly to other works of literature which I am sure were largely inspired by this autobiography. I listened to this book as an audiobook, which may be part of the problem, but Northup wrote his story with such elegance, grace, and forethought that it does read like a novel. I highly reccomend this book, despite the rating I am giving it, which is based largely on my personal experience while reading. I hope to read it again someday in hard copy, and give myself the time to fully process the weight of this story.

This was an amazing story of the perseverance and cruelty of the human spirit, one that happened so recently in our history, and like I said before, conveyed with such elegant prose. If anything, it has inspired me to learn more about this era in history to form a more complete understanding of the book's events.