Roots

Roots: The Saga of an American Family 

by Alex Haley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had a lot of trepidation about reading this book. I knew it would include a lot of really hard things and I am not good with that. However, it is an important book and I wanted to have read it for myself. Nick's chapter-a-day read-along pushed me to finally pull this off my shelf and read it. I am so glad I did!

The story starts in a Gambian village where we meet Kunta Kinte and learn about his life and his family through his own eyes. He is a very sympathetic and interesting person and incredibly resilient. A large portion of the novel follows him across the ocean on a slave ship and then through his life as a slave in the American south. Haley moves the story from generation to generation by changing the narrative point-of-view as various people leave one place for another (the reader follows the person leaving).

There were a LOT of really difficult things that happen in this book, but in the same way that Colson Whitehead is able to carry his reader through horrors by focusing tightly onto what is happening in the mind of the person things are happening to and how they are working to survive these events, Haley carried us through as well. 

The characters feel like real people -- they were based on Haley's actual ancestors-- and are people whose stories I am very glad to have learned.