From Powells.com
Staff Pick
On the surface, Swing Time is about two girls — only one with talent — who dream of being dancers. But what Zadie Smith gives us in her crisp, nuanced prose is a complex study of friendship, enmity, pop culture, roots, ambition, difference, and, underlying it all, race. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North-West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty
Two
brown girls dream of being dancers–but only one, Tracey, has talent.
The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black
music, 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…
Dazzlingly 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 can survive them. Moving from
North-West London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music
of time.
Review
"Agile and discerning…With homage to dance as a unifying force, arresting observations…exceptionally diverse and magnetizing characters, and lashing satire, Swing Time is an acidly funny, fluently global, and head-spinning novel about the quest for meaning, exaltation, and love….This tale of friendship lost and found is going to be big." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
“[A] powerful and complex novel…Rich and absorbing,
especially when it highlights Smith’s ever-brilliant perspective on pop
culture.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
“A keen, controlled novel about dance and blackness steps onto a
stage of cultural land mines…Smith is dazzling in her specificity,
evoking predicaments, worldviews, and personalities with a camera-vivid
precision…Moving, funny, and grave, this novel parses race and global
politics with Fred Astaire’s or Michael Jackson’s grace.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
About the Author
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, and NW, as well as a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. Swing Time is her fifth novel.