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Title: Pure fiction
Review: Jones has admitted that he did not do any research for this book. He must have researched slavery or at least learned a little about it at some point, but basically he's taking a very sad event in black history and completing fabricating a story. The places and people aren't real, even the "historians" he mentions are fabrications. As a novel, this is not a bad book but as a look at one element of the story of American slavery, this novel does nothing to contribute to our understanding. Fictionalizing slavery can be done well but if the author doesn't research the topic, the reader cannot see it as a book about slavery but as a novel about people who are dropped into a slavery setting. There's a huge difference and it's a shame that the difference isn't made clear in an author's note at the start of the novel.
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