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Swing Time

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Swing Time

By: Zadie Smith
Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
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About this listen

Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and true identity, how they shape us and how we can survive them. Moving from Northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.

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 20s, never to be revisited but never quite forgotten, either....

©2016 Zadie Smith (P)2016 Penguin Audio Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Funny Africa
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I loved it. The characters were engaging, the story is light and moves well yet is incredibly insightful and broadens the listener's horizons whilst being entertaining.

incredible!

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I really enjoyed Swing Time, great performance. Three stories woven together to create all interrelated.

Wonderful story

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Would you listen to Swing Time again? Why?

Yes. Mainly because the narration was absolutely fantastic.

What did you like best about this story?

The way the narrator brought everyone in the story to life.

What about Pippa Bennett-Warner’s performance did you like?

Her different accents were flawless

Wonderful but long

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I did not like any of the characters. Particularly the main protagonist. Great accents though.

Deserving Each Other.

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Beautifully written - I love her character details, observations on human nature, family, cultural identity. However the book frequently swings back and forth in time and place which I find difficult with an audiobook. I found the early 'Tracy' period very engaging but the later Aimee/Africa period was ho-hum. The narrator was outstanding.

Mixed feelings

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The voice narrator was excellent, especially handling so many accents. The story is uneven - one half of it is great, excellent characterisation, gripping plot, but the second half of the story involving a famous dancer and social enterprise in Africa was dull and the characters felt half-fleshed. It would have been a better book without that plot line!

Great reading, okay story

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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

To the right friend, definitely.

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

I'm thinking I should go back and read the end again. A really successful novel ends with at least a suggestion of shifting to a different level achieving the focus that was implicit through the workings of the story. I did not get this at the end of swing time but I'm wondering if it was my fault so A re-read is called for.

Which character – as performed by Pippa Bennett-Warner – was your favourite?

Tracy - frighteningly forceful, sharp, Smart and confronting, and Bennet-Warner's rendering had Tracy leaping from my device.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Most of the encounters with the main character's father, who was also extremely well captured by Bennet-Warner.

Any additional comments?

Overall I found the main character a bit depressing - always ready to be led, often bullied, and seemed to spend most of her life with bullying characters (her mother, Tracy, the dreadful Aimee). The narrator never really got my sympathy or became endearing in any way. Never seemed to find her own feet. (All this may be modified when I re-read the last couple of chapters - if so I'll come back and report the fact.)

On the other hand, ZS brilliantly captured all sorts of issues that are screaming at us in today's society - race, class, poverty, overseas aid, celebrity, the individual versus the social being - all captured in amazingly succinct fashion. For that I thank her and remain on her readers list.

Somewhat unfocussed novel, brilliant performance

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I read 'Swing Time' over a year ago and wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time. All this time later, the characters have stayed with me so strongly I feel compelled to explore how I felt about this book.

Audiobooks are a new medium for me and this book worked well in audio. I enjoyed the narration byPippa Bennet-Warner. She had a silky British accent and skilfully subtle accents and voices for the different characters.

'Swing Time' is a bildungsroman of an unnamed narrator growing up in 1980s housing estate London. She is of mixed-race and develops a competitive childhood friendship with a neighbouring child called Tracey, who is also mixed-race. The early parts of the book focussing on their childhood is enthralling. Tracey and the narrator struggle for power dynamics in their friendship, which over time turns toxic through jealousy. They are both aspiring dancers struggling with their identity as mixed race. The narrator is jealous of Tracey's superior dance talent while Tracey is jealous of the narrator's supportive two-parent home. The girls grow up and apart - Tracey continues her dance while the narrator's life takes her across the world. Our narrator loves dance from afar and puzzles over the history of dance, it's role in life and how black people fit in. The girls encounter each other on and off over the years and remain bitterly jealous of what the other has.

Ultimately, 'Swing Time' had a far ranging, ambitious plot that had a number of successful culminations but many puzzling add-ons. Overall it loses momentum and the early stages of the book where our narrator is young promise a more hopeful and riveting conclusion. The reason this book has stayed with me is the fascinating and vivid characters that demonstrated so many lessons pertinent to relationships, identity and career in modern day life. I 'read' this book via Audible audiobook while in holiday mode, so I had the time to be patient with the tangential plot-lines and enjoy the book moment-by-moment.

Slow burning but vivid characters

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I was a little disappointed as it was quite hard to follow with all of the flicking back and forth in time.
Tracey was a fairly awful person and yet the main character still referred to her as her 'spirit sister'. It seemed inconsistent and the main character didn't really seem to have any real personality or own interests or dreams of her own.
Maybe it's better to read the paperback

Hard to follow on Audio

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This book has some good writing ie about the central relationship between two girls. But all the long winded stuff about Africa was lost on me.

Too much waffle

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