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A review by leesmyth
Of One Blood by Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
2.0
I really wanted to like this, but it was merely OK. The overall effect was a bit like Rider Haggard mashed up with Charles Williams (though of course she was writing decades before CW), I suppose.
It's at its most engaging as an early post-Civil War effort to deal with racism/colonialism, and in its depiction of what might be a spiritual forerunner of Wakanda. The story and characterizations and plot twists were not that interesting to me. The three main characters form a love triangle - and a very ill-fated one indeed! - but the woman is very much a passive/victim type who suffers the most of all.
There's also some archaic language which seems unskillfully deployed -- the confusion between 'doth' and 'dost' was particularly galling -- though I am reluctant to blame Hopkins for that. The errors may well have been introduced in the scanning/editing/publishing process, as I also spotted a few bizarre typos (such as 'lie' for 'he').
It's at its most engaging as an early post-Civil War effort to deal with racism/colonialism, and in its depiction of what might be a spiritual forerunner of Wakanda. The story and characterizations and plot twists were not that interesting to me. The three main characters form a love triangle - and a very ill-fated one indeed! - but the woman is very much a passive/victim type who suffers the most of all.
There's also some archaic language which seems unskillfully deployed -- the confusion between 'doth' and 'dost' was particularly galling -- though I am reluctant to blame Hopkins for that. The errors may well have been introduced in the scanning/editing/publishing process, as I also spotted a few bizarre typos (such as 'lie' for 'he').