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I have to admit that I was a little wary coming into this book. Sure, everyone loved it. It's been recommended to me countless times. But I'm used to family sagas being a lot longer than this. I'm used to authors spending at least 500 pages with three, maybe four generations of a single family. To follow a family for eight generations? And to do it in 300 pages? I worried that the book would jump too much, that I'd be bitter about not spending more time with some of the characters. I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects toda...