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A review by monty_reads
The Kingdom on the Waves by M.T. Anderson
3.0
I can't wholeheartedly endorse the second volume of M.T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing series – it's a little too sprawling for its own good, and therefore given to redundancy – but it's an important book for Young Adult readers for one primary reason. Namely, that it lays bare the ugly hypocrisy at the heart of this country: that when our founders spoke of freedom and liberty, they meant it only for one very specific group. The title of the book, Traitor to the Nation, isn't a misnomer – it's deliberate and accurate. When Octavian flees from the College of Lucidity at the end of the first volume, he and his mentor, Dr. Trefusis, end up in Boston. Hungry and desperate, Octavian eventually takes up arms with the British army in Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment. Promised his freedom for enlisting, Octavian figures that turning his back on the rebels, who still view him as a slave, is the only reasonable course of action. And it makes sense.
Once in Lord Dunmore's army, Octavian realizes that the concept of freedom is just as malleable with the Brits as it is with colonists. Unlike the first volume, The Kingdom on the Waves is more or less a pure adventure story, from the grimy streets of Boston to the missions he undertakes as a soldier. In this way it's less thematically ambitious than The Pox Party, but the equivalent length means there's a lot of faffing about. It's possible M.T. Anderson dwells on the disease and squalor of Lord Dunmore's army (another description of smallpox? yay!) to make the point that Octavian was really no better off there than he would have been with the rebels, but I think the point could have been made in half the length. I often found my attention drifting, especially in the book's final third, and for a Young Adult book where momentum is everything, the occasional tedium made the book seem twice as long as its 500 pages.
But I'm painting an inaccurately bleak picture. The book is often genuinely thrilling and, as I mentioned above, it's very nearly essential reading for what it shows us about slave life and the paucity of choices available to them. Anderson goes to great pains in the afterword to point out just how much of this book is based in the historical record; it's a sobering fact that was an eye-opener to me, let alone a 15-year-old kid who only knows about slavery from less accurate sources in popular media.
Once in Lord Dunmore's army, Octavian realizes that the concept of freedom is just as malleable with the Brits as it is with colonists. Unlike the first volume, The Kingdom on the Waves is more or less a pure adventure story, from the grimy streets of Boston to the missions he undertakes as a soldier. In this way it's less thematically ambitious than The Pox Party, but the equivalent length means there's a lot of faffing about. It's possible M.T. Anderson dwells on the disease and squalor of Lord Dunmore's army (another description of smallpox? yay!) to make the point that Octavian was really no better off there than he would have been with the rebels, but I think the point could have been made in half the length. I often found my attention drifting, especially in the book's final third, and for a Young Adult book where momentum is everything, the occasional tedium made the book seem twice as long as its 500 pages.
But I'm painting an inaccurately bleak picture. The book is often genuinely thrilling and, as I mentioned above, it's very nearly essential reading for what it shows us about slave life and the paucity of choices available to them. Anderson goes to great pains in the afterword to point out just how much of this book is based in the historical record; it's a sobering fact that was an eye-opener to me, let alone a 15-year-old kid who only knows about slavery from less accurate sources in popular media.