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j_f 's review for:
Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family
by David Stevens, Alex Haley
I love long books. I discovered this about myself while reading Queen, which contains pretty much everything I love about long books.
Queen is a novel about Queen Haley, Alex Haley's paternal grandmother. It begins in Ireland in the late 1700s with Alex's ancestor, James Jackson, and follows that lineage all the way down to Alex himself (early 1900s). As a result, the novel is not just about Queen, and yet, her very existence and her life as a whole are representative of so much more than simply her part in the novel.
First, there is the sprawling story. This is not a book you speed through, not because of its length, but because of its subject matter. I had to stop reading regularly to get my bearings, because as you can imagine with a slave narrative, lots of terrible things happen not only to the main character but to pretty much every black person in the novel. However, the story keeps giving, keeps going in spite of the suffering, and that makes it more hopeful--or, as hopeful as it could possibly be.
Then, there is the satisfaction of knowing the main characters' inner-most thoughts and feelings, and getting to feel like you are intimately connected with them. This is an advantage over short books, in which it is more difficult to feel close to the characters. In a long book, the author doesn't need to use as much metaphor or symbolism to convey emotion, because they give the reader so much time to spend with the character first-hand. In Queen, I think this was particularly significant, because Queen and the other black people throughout the novel have almost no "outlet" for their suffering, and so for the book to be filled with allegory and flowery language would be inappropriate. It is somehow a quiet novel, as much as an expansive one.
Lastly, there is the straightforward and clear writing style, which makes the book not feel quite so long. In the same way that a shorter book can feel too long because of clunky, complicated writing conventions, clear writing in a long book makes you keep turning pages.
Queen is a novel about Queen Haley, Alex Haley's paternal grandmother. It begins in Ireland in the late 1700s with Alex's ancestor, James Jackson, and follows that lineage all the way down to Alex himself (early 1900s). As a result, the novel is not just about Queen, and yet, her very existence and her life as a whole are representative of so much more than simply her part in the novel.
First, there is the sprawling story. This is not a book you speed through, not because of its length, but because of its subject matter. I had to stop reading regularly to get my bearings, because as you can imagine with a slave narrative, lots of terrible things happen not only to the main character but to pretty much every black person in the novel. However, the story keeps giving, keeps going in spite of the suffering, and that makes it more hopeful--or, as hopeful as it could possibly be.
Then, there is the satisfaction of knowing the main characters' inner-most thoughts and feelings, and getting to feel like you are intimately connected with them. This is an advantage over short books, in which it is more difficult to feel close to the characters. In a long book, the author doesn't need to use as much metaphor or symbolism to convey emotion, because they give the reader so much time to spend with the character first-hand. In Queen, I think this was particularly significant, because Queen and the other black people throughout the novel have almost no "outlet" for their suffering, and so for the book to be filled with allegory and flowery language would be inappropriate. It is somehow a quiet novel, as much as an expansive one.
Lastly, there is the straightforward and clear writing style, which makes the book not feel quite so long. In the same way that a shorter book can feel too long because of clunky, complicated writing conventions, clear writing in a long book makes you keep turning pages.