Small Island: A Novel

I loved everything about this book. It brings such a looked-over perspective from WWII to the forefront and makes for an interesting and moving read. Most war books focus on the fighting, but the glimpses into how it affected the daily lives of civilians and especially how it affected the lives of people not part of the West made it unique. This book does the work of bringing attention to how nuanced the relations during the war were and that it was not simply the "Good" versus the "Bad". It also calls attention to British "amnesia" and ignorance and shows how harmful it is. And not only is the book thought compelling and informative but it does all this while being a genuinely engaging read.

Every character in the book is extremely thought out and complex and you get to see how they all grow and change throughout the book. While reading it I felt my feelings for the characters changing and shifting the more I read about them. They all felt like real people which is important when writing about complicated issues and they all evoked strong emotions in me ranging from hatred to laughter. I also really loved how the plot of the book was laid out, switching from the past to the present so that the reader slowly gets all the pieces to the big picture. Levy really created a wonderful, wonderful novel that more people should know about!

When an author chooses to write a novel in the first person, they make a choice about the voice of the novel as a whole. The interior dialogue of a narrator must match their exterior dialogue. If the two don't match up, it detracts from the credibility of the character and the overall readability of the novel. The disparity between inner and outer voice is especially striking when the character speaks in dialect, as is the case here. The narrative switches among 4 characters, two native Englishpeople, and two who have moved from Jamaica to England. One of the Jamaicans speaks in a strong dialect, while the other is quite proud of her "King's English" even though she often finds that English shopkeepers don't understand a word she says. And yet the interior voice of both of these characters is largely the same as each other, and the same as the other two narrators. I found this disparity distracted a lot from the story.