Book Review: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

This is another one that's been on my shelf for a while, and one that everyone seems to have read! I've read some Zadie Smith previously and was looking forward to this one. 

Two brown girls from Willesden dream of being dancers. One has the talent to go far, while the other (our unnamed narrator) struggles to embrace her ambitions because of her ideas and theories about race, identity, class, and family. While Tracey indulges her dancing dreams, her friend finds it hard to find her place in life. Theirs is an intense yet dysfunctional friendship that all but dissolves when they reach their twenties, but is never fully forgotten by either of them.

I enjoyed this book, and love Zadie Smith's vivid writing, but found this one a bit tough to fully engage with. It felt like the book was trying to say SO much about SO many things that it all became a bit muddled and it was a bit confusing as to what the story actually was. Smith raises issues of racial identity, tribalism, home, friendship, gender, social class, and more, but it feels like none of these topics were ever engaged with on more than a surface level. The dancing element of the book - which the blurb describes as the main focus - only really occupies the first couple of chapters and is then lost, and instead we now follow the narrator as she works as a personal assistant to a pop star who's started a project in a small African village to build a girl's school. Meanwhile, Tracey, her friend, is still living in the Willesden estate where she grew up, taking bit parts in off-West End shows as a chorus dancer.

As I said, I did enjoy this but just felt there was too much going on and it often felt like as a reader I was just drifting through the book with no real grounding or idea of what was happening. An aspect I enjoyed was the exploration of two very different lives - the two girls grow up together but their lives take completely different paths. I felt it also raised good points about extreme wealth and how those with a lot of money often try to 'help' those with less with no real thought about whether they're helping or hindering.

This was an okay read, but not really one that would stick with me. Quite a disjointed plot, lots of random time jumps, and a lot of characters that don't really seem to serve much of a purpose and seem rather one-dimensional.

3/5 from me.