Review of 'The Good Lord Bird' by James McBride

I quite liked this - I started watching the TV series around the beginning of the first lockdown, and gave up - mainly because Ruth didn't like how violent it was. I might go back to it. It's interesting in treating John Brown as a bit of a nutter rather - or perhaps as well as - an abolitionist hero. The narrator is a young Black man (well, boy really) who is swept against his will into the guerrila war against slavery in Kansas that preceded the Civil War proper, and for various accidental reasons ends up passing as a girl for most of the book. Some of that it funny, though there are serious aspects to it, about the relationship between race and gender.

I'd never heard of James McBride before but I'll look out for more of him.