Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Although it's being marketed as historical fiction, this book is actually the author's family mythology, full of secretly swapped babies, American nobility (?), "coloured" mistresses, family secrets, and...I'm making it sound far more exciting than it is. The characters have exactly one note: frenetic. They scream at each other for four-hundred pages in impenetrable (and inaccurate) dialect, and when they get tired of that, there's raping and wife beating to be done. Other reviewers have covered the factual errors and blatantly unnecessary violence. But worst of all, the book doesn't seem to have any reason to exist. A lot potential themes are brought up, various abuses of slavery or the immediate post-slavery period, but the author speeds past them with vast time skips to create a slide show of horrors instead. The cast has no development. The titular character spends most conversations saying, "What?" "Huh?" "I have to [repeats exactly what she was just told]?" I don't think she ever actually does anything on her own, just gets yelled along by other characters. As for the supporting cast, they show up every few decades to deliver the same threat or make the same offensive comment as last time, with no one ever growing or developing. In all four hundred pages, there is nothing to connect to, nothing to engage the reader, no questions to ask. There is nothing here but slavesploitation. Diagnosis: Read Pudd'nhead Wilson instead.