To be clear from the very beginning, I didn’t finish the book. I dropped it somewhere in the middle.

General information about Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

This book is about the life and adventures of Washington Black, a man who was born a slave, became a person of science, escaped and travelled the world.

Doesn’t it sound exciting?! I thought so too. Besides, the book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. Doesn’t it guarantee a good book? Not for me, apparently.

I purchased the ebook together with the audio version. The plan was to alternate between reading and listening. The two versions are synchronised, so you can stop reading and continue listening from the same place where you stopped reading, and vice versa. Future has come!

Even though I thus paid a double price for the story, I knew it would be a bigger loss if I had continued wasting my time on the book. Having dragged through Washington Black for weeks, I finally dropped it.

Not only did I stop reading it, I did it at the moment when the protagonist was in mortal danger. I. did. not. care. That’s how generally boring it was.

What’s so bad about Washington Black

The story

Some descriptions mentioned that Washington Black was “inspired by a true story”. I’m not sure to what extent the story is true, it feels absolutely naive and sugar-coated.

The characters

There is no depth to the characters: villains are villains, good guys are good. The characters are absolutely predictable and do not seem to develop.

The writing

The writing is another curious detail of this book. It tries to be beautiful so it does sound sophisticated but quite pretentious. I see no reason for “the dying gold of morning” at a banal breakfast. To me it looks misplaced, like somebody wearing a ball gown for grocery shopping.

What’s good in Washington Black

Theoretically, a story about a person fighting his way to freedom while crossing different countries and meeting different people, should be interesting.

This theory didn’t work for me.

Final thought on Washington Black

I’m sure the book will find its readers, but I’m not one of them.

I’m starting to suspect that some level of implausibility is expected in thrillers in the same way as dragons and elves are expected in fantasy.

The Stranger Diaries is not a bad thriller. It’s gripping, fast-paced and it’s a very easy read. It took me just a few hours to finish the book. My eyes were gliding through the book. I wasn’t bored once and I even managed to like a couple of characters and to chuckle a couple of times. That alone means that the book is a proper read for a few hours to kill.

The story is about students, teachers and their families. Someone of them is a murderer.

I found it hard to believe, though, that two main characters managed to miss major spheres of each other’s lives. Their friends and even random strangers who accidentally walked into their rooms discovered the secrets within minutes and yet these two family members living under the same roof did never notice such things.

The Stranger Diary is described as “contemporary gothic” and it’s not really untrue. It’s just that contemporary in this book goes one way while the gothic part goes the other. The gothic floats in contemporary like oil in water. They do not mix or match. There’s a modern family story, there’s a gothic family story. They do not cross. If you try really hard you can find a few threads to bind them together just for the sake of justifying the existence of the gothic part in the plot. If you pull them apart you will have two fully formed unconnected stories. Up to the shocking point that one of them is squeezed whole at a very unexpected moment of the other.

My other, very likely overly subjective, reason to be confused with the story is that its characters’ names often start with the same letter. Try to distinguish between them when you have a dozen of others to keep an eye on: Holland, Henry Hamilton, Herbert. One of them is a dog. At one point the protagonist talked about two of them. It took me some time to remember who of them was the dog.

A few other implausible moments happen when a character contradicts his own behaviour. At first he protects something and just a few pages later launches to destroy it with no reason for the change. One mystery is solved because apparently nobody has ever looked at a historical artefact close enough, but now a teenager did so and the answer is suddenly found. A character gets shocked at an “unacademic” word “creepy” but then says something as unacademic as “soonish”. (That “soonish” made my Kindle come too close to be disposed through the window).

Thus, although The Stranger Diary is entertaining, fast-paced and gratifyingly easy to read, these details soured my experience. I’m giving the book 3.5 stars, but I can imagine that many people will like it more than that. 

I’m thanking the publishers for the copy that I received in exchanged for my honest and unbiased opinion.