Traitor to the Race

Rating:
Summary: Very few, if any, redeeming qualities in this novel
Review: I labored through to the center of the book but could not finish. 'Traitor To The Race', is the story of a gay African American man (Kenneth) and his white partner (Evan). The two are engaged in a relationship that consists of sexual role-playing and fantasy. Although the couple's games are injected throughout the novel, I had a hard time understanding their relevance to the greater theme. Perhaps the games had something to do with a learned power struggle between black and white men; however you couldn't derive that from the text. The rape and murder of Kenneth's cousin, also gay, by white men is the catalyst for a pseudo intellectual debate among Kenneth and his close friends on the state of race relations and sexual orientation in the greater populace. Nothing particularly fresh or insightful was delivered in this debate. I found the author's writing style very difficult to embrace. The use of multiple voices lacks the transitory qualities necessary to provide cohesion when such a complicated method of storytelling is used. The language took me nowhere and the pace was at times torturous. The excessive use of colons and parentheticals were bothersome and distracting. Scott completely missed the marked on this one in my opinion. Spend your time and money elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Very few, if any, redeeming qualities in this novel
Review: I labored through to the center of the book but could not finish. �Traitor To The Race�, is the story of a gay African American man (Kenneth) and his white partner (Evan). The two are engaged in a relationship that consists of sexual role-playing and fantasy. Although the couple�s games are injected throughout the novel, I had a hard time understanding their relevance to the greater theme. Perhaps the games had something to do with a learned power struggle between black and white men; however you couldn�t derive that from the text. The rape and murder of Kenneth�s cousin, also gay, by white men is the catalyst for a pseudo intellectual debate among Kenneth and his close friends on the state of race relations and sexual orientation in the greater populace. Nothing particularly fresh or insightful was delivered in this debate. I found the author�s writing style very difficult to embrace. The use of multiple voices lacks the transitory qualities necessary to provide cohesion when such a complicated method of storytelling is used. The language took me nowhere and the pace was at times torturous. The excessive use of colons and parentheticals were bothersome and distracting. Scott completely missed the marked on this one in my opinion. Spend your time and money elsewhere.