A Small Island – Andrea Levy – 7/10

Well, despite the plaudits that this book has received I have to say that it took me until nearly the end to actually enjoy this book!  I wanted to slap Hortense as soon as her character was revealed to me in the early chapters, but I must admit that I identified a lot of similarities between her husband, and my partner Robert (also from Jamaican heritage).  The Jamaican patois in the book was pretty familiar to me (I’ve heard it a lot over the last 10 years), and I could easily recognise similarities in their story and that of Robert’s parents who also came over from Jamaica to help re-create our country after the war.  I am sure that their experiences of racial inequality were very similar to those expressed in the book, and unfortunately many still exist today.  Using the same rating scale with which we usually rate movies, I’d give this a 7/10.  A bit slow to start, the last half of the book better than the first, but the last few chapters were dynamite!