Swing Time

Two brown girls dream of  

ISBN 0241144159
(ISBN13: 9780241144152)

being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Dazzling energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we survive them. Moving from Northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time. 

453 pages

Published November 15th 2016 (Hamish Hamilton)

First Impression

The narrator comes across as a plain Jane her mother dressed them both as plainly as possible. Tracey is described as her mother's "striking accessory" with diamante everything, and expensive trainers.

My Rating ⭐

Set in the 1st person, Swing Time tells the story of the narrator and her friend, Tracey. Zadie Smith has sectioned of stages of the story into 7 separate parts.

In the first section the plot jumps from Tracey and the narrator meeting to church and then dancing. As a reader, I find myself baffled as it doesn't seem to have a flow it's just put together.

3 chapters in I had no other option than to put it as a "DNF". I just couldn't do it...from the blur it sounded like a book worth reading but I am so disappointed with how it is structured which is one of the reasons why I have to give it 1 star.

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