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Swing Time
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Swing Time
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Swing Time
Audiobook13 hours

Swing Time

Written by Zadie Smith

Narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A New York Times bestseller * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.

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 twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.

Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.

But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey-the same twists, the same shakes-and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 15, 2016
ISBN9780735205628
Unavailable
Swing Time

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Reviews for Swing Time

Rating: 3.690590588235294 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

425 ratings54 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway.

    The highest point achieved by this novel was its ambition to be a The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I'm confident that wasn't the author's intention.(Nor am I sure Mr. Rushdie would appreciate my appropriation of his novel as a slur)

    This novel is about women, about movement and dance, about confidence in both senses. It is also a mess. I was hoping for more of the mother-daughter dynamic, instead we have celebrity activism. Opinion appears rather polarized about Zadie's work. I regard White Teeth and NW as essential and most of the other fiction as flawed. I remain in ZS's corner and am hoping for better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Possibly my favourite Zadie Smith novel. So much goodness sprayed across a canvas that stretches from Kilburn to Manhattan via Africa. This is a novelist at the height of her powers from tiny and intimate portraits of a church hall dance class to a Madonna-type global superstar and her entourage.

    Specific and sprawling and Franzenesque in all the best ways.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zadie Smith can be brilliant and frustrating in equal parts. This book certainly doesn't lack ambition, it is always readable and entertaining and parts of it are excellent, but once again I was left feeling this is not the great work that such a talented writer should be capable of, and for me none of her subsequent novels have matched her debut White Teeth.To start with the positives - I really enjoyed the first part in which the unnamed narrator describes her childhood friendship with Tracey. They meet in a dance class and share a love of old musicals, Tracey is the more talented dancer but without the narrator she lacks direction and struggles to escape her broken family and her largely absent criminal father. The narrator has a caring but ineffectual white father and an ambitious self-taught mother who becomes a politician. Tracey achieves some success as a dancer but fails to make a long term career of it in the face of impossible odds.For me the problems concern the character Aimee, a megastar singer and dancer who is Australian but shares many of the attributes, the career trajectory, lifestyle and aspirations of Madonna. The narrator works for her and is exploited to the point of having no life of her own, and is involved in a vanity project to build a school in West Africa (in a country which is not named but can only be Gambia). For me it is impossible to create such a character and make her completely separate from the real figures who embody the characteristics she does. Smith has a lot to say about exploitation, black history and the realities of working in Africa, and these ideas are almost sufficient to compensate for the weaknesses. There are some fascinating asides about the careers of some of the black dancers (Jeni LeGon, Bojangles and others) who played bit parts in classic song and dance movies, and how they were exploited.For all its faults this is an accomplished work, more fully realised that some of Smith's previous novels, and I can see why it made the Booker longlist, but there are too many stronger books on the list for me to see it as likely shortlist material, let alone as a potential winner.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ambitious novel, yet I wasn't drawn in to characters as I had been in White Teeth. Interesting development of female friendship and racial identity with young girls in England.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zadie Smith´s novel is written from the perspective of an unnamed thirtysomething female narrator who grows up in a working-class neighborhood of London with her white father and Jamaican mother. Her best friend until young adulthood is another biracial girl named Tracey, who is raised by a single mom and occasionally visited by an absentee dad. Both girls attend dance classes as children, and they share eclectic obsessions with dancers ranging from Ginger Rogers to Michael Jackson. The two 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, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. The novel follows the gradual breakup of their friendship and the narrator’s early adulthood when she works as a personal assistant for a famous pop star who wants to found a school for girls in West Africa.The novel is easy to read, but still has a lot of twists and covers interesting topics, touching on a variety of issues ranging from purpose, destiny, fame, to self-worth, all driven by relationships between family and life-long friends. I thoroughly appreciated her choice to interweave stories across from time periods of their lives.For a large majority of the novel, the narrator exists in juxtaposition to Tracy, yet Tracy dominates every scene she appears in. I did not fully understand what the author wanted to tell by putting these two girls in the center especially because the narrator stays quite undefined.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An unnamed narrator grows up in London with her best friend Tracey. Both love the dance. Our narrator has a deep love of golden-age classics like Astaire, but grows up to be a personal assistant to Amy, a narcissistic Madonna-like pop star, who naively wants to play Lady Bountiful in Africa. Meanwhile, Tracey has real talent for dance and pursues a West End career, but cannot escape her class/caste and is bitter against everyone, definitely including our narrator.I enjoyed the relationship between the two girls, and how it bled into their adult lives even though they didn't see each other. I also really enjoyed the portrayal of the narrator's feminist/activist/politician mother. She was my favorite character in the book, actually, and our narrator did not fully appreciate her, as kids don't, I suppose.Finally, I must say I dislike the unnamed narrator strategy because it makes it hard to write a review.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a story about identity, friendship, family relationships, race relationships, and more. I think Ms. Smith has tried to pack too much into this novel. At times, I was very engaged with it; at others, it seemed to be going nowhere -- or sending a message about an important issue rather than furthering the story. Some of the characters were well developed; others seemed almost like parodies (Aimee; the mother). As one reviewer has said, I was more impressed with the writing itself than the story.This is my fourth book by Zadie Smith. In my opinion, she has never equaled her excellent first book, White Teeth.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I struggled with this book; it took me nearly two months to finish it. No resolutions at the end. Still, I enjoyed Smith's writing and will give her another try.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is on a few "best of the year" lists, and I'm not sure why. It's a solid book, engrossing but occasionally long-winded and repetitive. Maybe it would have been more effective (and entertaining!) at 300 vs. 453 pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you love dance, if you love Fred Astaire, if you love language, if you're ready for a conversation about race on the international level, then this book is for you. As usual, Zadie Smith writes with grace and loving kindness. (Brian)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am not entirely sure how I felt about this book. I loved elements of it. The relationship between the narrator and Tracy was so engaging. The pas de deux between the luminescent daring, possibly mentally ill dancing prodigy and the rather dull, flat footed self doubting and somewhat undistinguished narrator is compelling as is the narrator's family relationship. The analysis of what blackness means (especially as that differs in England, the US, and an unidentified African nation) is fascinating, fresh, well told. But the book went a bit off the rails for me when Aimee became its primary driver. I feel like Zadie Smith tried to do too many things here and the book lost narrative focus as a result. A solid 3.5. I listened to the audio and the narrator was just superb.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I wanted to like this. I tried to like this. But when a 453 page book takes me almost a month to read, there's something wrong. I started it with high hopes, but soon I was just plodding along, reading a few pages before I put it down to find something else to do. It's about the lives of two young girls growing up in the London suburbs and trying to achieve their dreams. They both love to dance, but only one has real skill and innate talent. There are also themes about growing up bi-racial in the early 80's. This is one of those books that starts with a prelude to the ending, and then it goes back and forth between when the two girls first met and the relatively current events building up to what was hinted at in the prelude. I didn't like the characters and there wasn't a whole lot happening. Also, what was alluded to at the beginning was really just a non-event to me. I've heard a lot of great things about this before, and I will give another book of hers a shot, but I can't recommend this one.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the first part of this novel about the childhoods of two friends obsessed by dance and old film musicals that featured dancers. Growing up in public housing, both have very different mothers ambitious for their daughters. One is the classic stage mother and the other a highly disciplined political activist determined that she and her daughter will rise to a different rung of society.However the second part seemed pretty pointless to me.The nameless narrator and her friend Tracey become estranged during their early twenties and follow different paths into adulthood; neither can gain a productive foothold in the world. Tracey has some early success on the stage, but is derailed by single motherhood and bitterly stuck in the same public housing she grew up in. The narrator goes to college and ends up as one of the personal assistants to a mega pop star named Aimee. The young women are really shadows of their childhood selves, and that's how the novel ends. There is a rather Chekhovian naturalism to the book, but Chekhov stuck to pointed short forms -- stories and plays. Swing Time goes on far too long.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a story of two multi-racial girls who meet and become best friends in dance class. Much separates them later, class, education, travel, careers, relationships and they grow apart. Neither fulfills her aspirations and I felt this to be a generally depressing novel.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    To be fair... I give this book 2.5 stars. It's not that I didn't like it at all... I just didn't like it very much. The writing itself was good; each scene was full of detail and real presence. Overall, the story felt, to me, like it had no real point. There were really interesting and sometimes tragic events and certainly plenty of interesting and tragic characters swarming around the main character... who honestly was so mind-numbingly normal and boring and immature... I felt like the author missed out on opportunities to tell exciting stories by sticking with her one focus. The main character was so caught up in the minutia and boring aspects of her daily life, that she didn't seem to DO anything. All of her action was caught up in and brushed up against the more thrilling lives swirling around her, yet she almost stubbornly held herself aloof and separate from it all. The swinging back and forth over her timeline from childhood to adulthood was irritating... every other chapter jumping around as if the author had split the chronological manuscript in two and shuffled it back together like a card dealer. I kept waiting for something climactic, something to shake this woman out of her blind progression, but even when there was a promise of something, it wasn't as dramatic as I hoped. In fact, I found all of her turning points were as boring as her everyday existence. I like realism and I like real people... but I felt like someone might as well write a novel about my life and the non-dramas of making sandwiches and doing laundry and complaining about work, which would be about as interesting as this book was. Disappointing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As someone who was blown away by white teeth, I have followed Zadie smith closely to see if she could equal that uproarious, jubilant debut of a novel. Swing time came closest for me. But it still lacks the cohesiveness of her first novel as well as its energy. However be prepared for a few spot on vivid characters like the narrators mother, Tracey herself and perhaps Amy , the celebrity boss, and some crackling insights into celebrity philanthropy in Africa. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book ( listened to the audio version) even though the interlacing timelines were a little distracting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zadie Smith's reputation is well-deserved and this book comes across with a strong plot woven with symbolism and managing to say something profound while still being true to very realistic characters. One moment that particularly resonated with me came towards the end of the novel, after the main character has been unceremoniously let go from her job with a famous singer and in revenge she leaks information to the press. A friend's response: you are still very young. Having observed so many similar experiences, the true magic of this book and its writing is to feel that harmony between the book and the reader's own experiences. Few authors can craft such a complex and wide-reaching novel and I look forward to reading more of Zadie Smith.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a story of the friendship of two girls growing up in public housing in Northwest London who connect in a dance class (the only brown girls in the class) at age 7. The book zig zags through the decades of their relationship, from closeness to being estranged and from London to Africa. Lovely narration.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I wondered why the title was Swing Time - it swings in time between the main character's childhood and her present as a young woman, with her childhood friend Tracey weaving between the two. Zadie Smith portrays the two young girls with remarkable depth. You know these girls! Both interracial, they grow up in low-income housing in the less glamorous realms of London. The young Tracey is indomitable, calling all the shots in the friendship. The protagonist seems to have little will of her own -- she remains unnamed throughout the book and slides, somewhat by chance, into a position as a personal assistant to an international rock star, who, like Tracey, calls all the shots. The secondary characters are well developed, not only Tracy, but the mother, the rock star, Aimee, and several of the minor characters in the African village where Aimee decides to build a school. In many ways this is a political and social commentary, although it is not polemic. It delves into life for the lower-classes, for the interracial, local politics and the implications of the famous toying with the lives of those in third-world countries.Totally engaging!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Two little mixed race girls in London dream of becoming dancers. One makes it to the chorus line, but has issues with adult responsibilities. The other becomes assistant to a famous performer, possibly losing herself in the process. When the performer decides to open a school in Africa, she is introduced to a new world, new people with different lives and a dose of reality.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    We are used to loveable losers in literature, but in Tracey this book has something rather special; a best friend and enemy, a villain and victim all rolled into one. Sadly she's by far the most interesting thing about the book and appears far too infrequently. The shift to Gap Yah Politics left me yearning for the passages back home.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is definitely a novel of the times. It is anecdotal in form, and time shifts are constant. The author's writing can be quite compelling. However, ultimately the book has the power of watching someone play golf. In other words, none. You are a voyeur, not a participant. So are the characters; at the conclusion, the reader knows only what the author has divulged in snippets of plot; there is no sense of understanding the past/present/future of any of the major characters, including the hero(ine). Although many issues are raised none are explored. Characters pop up 100 pages after we've last seen them, years have passed...who are these people?Therefore, reading Swing Time leaves one with the empty feeling of having posted and knowing that no one will respond.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zadie Smith's new novel is about two girls who meet in a dance class. They're the only two brown girls in the class, but they become friends because of their shared love of dance and those old movies starring Fred Astaire. Tracey has talent, and eventually their paths diverge, as our narrator gives up dance and moves on to university, then a job at a television studio and then as an assistant to a famous singer (a little too obviously modeled on Madonna). But their paths will eventually cross again.Swing Time feels like two novels mashed together. The parts set during the narrator's childhood are fantastic. They feel true and they make for fascinating reading as both girls grow up. They are both interracial girls living in housing estates who share a common interest, but there the similarities stop. The narrator's mother is driven to better herself, to get a degree and to change the world and her father is loving and present. Tracey is being raised by a single mother who is harshly judged by the neighbors for first being lazy and then, after she finds a job, for leaving her daughter alone too much. But Tracey's house is freer and her mother more present in her life than the narrator's. The other part of the book concerns a famous rock star who is interested in Africa and who sends the narrator there to keep an eye on the school she founds. The narrator's experiences in the unnamed African country don't quite reach the level of Westerner-touched-by-the-simple-lives-of-the-natives, but it's not comfortable reading. And the parts involving the Madonna-like Aimee were interesting, but fell short of the other part of the book. Still, this is an interesting book by a gifted writer and worth the time spent with it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have read every fiction book done by Zadie Smith(5) and I would say that this one is her weakest. That being said, it is still a good book. Very well written with great prose and interesting insights. The basic story is told in the 1st person by an unnamed narrator. She is from NW London the daughter of a white father and a Jamaican mother. Her friend Tracey is also from a mixed marriage and the 2 develop a friendship through dance. This relationship is an ongoing backdrop to the story that deals with their upbringings, different parental influences, and ultimately to their adult lives in their early 30's. The book goes back and forth between the present and past. It deals with our narrator being a personal assistant to a Madonna like pop star. This leads the story to West Africa. The book touches on so many issues and introduces many characters. Unfortunately a first person narrative is always tough because the you have to like the narrator and trust their view of the other characters. It doesn't totally work here. If you have read Zadie Smith before then I recommend this. If not, then start with "White Teeth"(her first novel) as your introduction to this very talented writer. I have enjoyed her for her world view that gets me outside my American perspective on things.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My first Zadie Smith and perhaps not the best one to have started with. The prose itself was fine but the story left me cold. It started promising enough, our narrator and her friend Tracy, two brown girls dream about being dancers. Our narrator, however, has flat feet and little talent for dance, though she can sing. Tracy is the one with dance talent and her acceptance into a dance school with serve to start the separation of our two friends.Forward to the future, our narrator is an assistant to popular dancer/singer, maybe a Brittany Spears type of entertainer who wants to build a girl's school in West Africa. We go back and forth in time, the past, the present in Africa. I should have loved this part but I found the characters flat, our narrator little changed from her youth, and the pacing incredibly slow. It is hard to overcome the fact that a secondary character, Tracy is so much more interesting, that the parts that include her are interesting, while the other characters just seem wooden.Cultural identity is explored, old movies, dance but not as much as the title of the book leads is to believe. I found myself skimming, never a good thing, and at the end there were a few redeemable things. I will try to read another of her books, as I said the prose itself was worthy, just wished for more interesting aspects in the plot itself. There are many four and five star reviews for this book, keep in mind, this is just my reaction to it and may not be yours.ARC from Netgalley.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A long, rambling book about women and their roles as seen through the lenses of dance, celebrity and diaspora. Some lovely moments and interesting characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good writing from Zadie Smith but can't say that I particularly enjoyed this book. This outing into the lives of two Black British girls growing up in London (Tracey and her nameless friend) and their lives up to around their late 30s. The book is narrated entirely by the nameless friend. Growing up on a council estate with Tracey, a promising dancer, and the narrator's mother, who sees education as the answer to life beyond being a housewife, the narrator drifts through childhood and adolescence and into a degree in media, following which she drifts into becoming the PA for a celebrity pop star. Much of the book centres around life as the celebrity PA, including the vacuous antics of the celebrity in Africa, which involve setting up a girl's school and adopting (i.e. buying) a baby. Many of the novel's themes around race, class, politics, London are familiar Zadie Smith territory with celebrity/ celebrity antics and narcissism thrown into the mix. While well-written and some interesting sections, overall I wasn't gripped by this novel- none of the characters are very likeable and this includes the narrator, whose self-obsession and shallowness become tedious and the lack of plot (the story is very loosely based around incidents in childhood, university and then work) didn't help.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked parts of this book. Lots of parts , however, I found preachy. long winded. The parent - child dynamic is a very strong theme in this novel yet if left me cold.Swing Time is a novel I wanted to love but ended up being a novel I struggled to finish. This is not the fault of the language. The story is exquisitely written, with powerful and unambiguous prose. The problem lies with the characters and with how the story is told.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ugh, not the best start to my New Year's resolution of reading more in 2017! I would have to concur with the other three star reviews here - Zadie Smith is a brilliant wordsmith, but when readers are left thinking, 'Wow, that was really well written!' over 'What a great story with relatable characters!', something has obviously come unstuck. I loved the chapters in 1980s London, which were the most convincing, but 'Aimee' (a Madonna style popstar) and the section in Africa didn't move me at all. Also, I was barely conscious by the end, but that only stirred a passing 'Huh?' from me. The pacing was completely off, too - why the constant back and forth if nothing really came of Tracey's story? A disappointment, but I shall not be defeated.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    "I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people's homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying someone else's baby on her hip, and looking over at you with a secret she can't tell..."I am a fan of Smith. A much savvier reading friend put me on to her through [On Beauty], the story of two families mixed histories. I wish she still wrote for the Guardian Reviews about other people's books. I thought the only problem with The Embassy of Cambodia was it was too short, and NW struck all sorts of memories about living in London. So that is a really longwinded way of saying that I was really pleased to get a Netgalley for this book.Told exclusively from the perspective of one young woman, child of a white working class guy and a woman from Jamaica who is so determined to pull herself up she has all but forgotten her daughter is there too. [Swing Time] is a reference to the musicals which she watches with her friend Tracey, a gifted dancer. Those dances, the films, and their music, recur throughout the book as the narrator reflects on her family and 'race'. Tracey's dad left long ago, and her mum is not working, 'on benefits', with a 'Kilburn facelift'. Smith catches the differences between a certain kind of aspirational family and a kind of working class one: including the firm belief from parents that children can be somehow convinced that not having a particular doll is a *good* thing (fail).The story leaps between the narrator's childhood and her employment as a PA to an Australian singer-actress: long famous, young despite her years, fiercely fit and capable of dropping people without looking back. The singer, Aimee, decides to fund a school in Senegal. Our narrator is the pathfinder, exploring the options for supporting a girls' school, spending long periods in the Senegalese village to make plans with a more experienced development worker. And here her job gets horribly complicated. Smith nods to the freight of a British -Jamaican in West Africa: she visits the slave castles, tries to imagine herself back in time. But in the village she is given oven chips instead of sharing the family rice, not permitted to work or help, and treated firmly as an outsider. It was here that I most loved this book. Smith puts her finger on so many development gremlins: subtly and smartly, not offering glib solutions just raising things to the light and saying 'this is really odd: what is going on here?' The bit at the end might sound far fetched but for the news of celebs and their 'African adventures'. Smith lets no one off lightly.