Biography
Porter Regina © Francesca Mantovani
Regina PORTER is an award-winning playright and a graduate of the lowa Writer’s workshop, where she was an Lowa Arts Fellow. She was born in Savannah Georgia and lives in Brooklyn. The Travelers is her first novel published in 2019.
Review : The Travelers
This book, written by Regina Porter, needs to be read with a huge concentration to keep the thread of the story. There are a lot of characters who appear at different times in the story and at different ages (from 1946 to 2010), which is tricky at first. Fortunately, there is a list of characters and a family tree at the beginning and end of the book, which is a really smart idea. We follow two main characters and their families, one is black (Agnes) and the other is white (James). The man, James is the main character of numerous chapters. He can be shown during his childhood with his parents and then with his own family when he is older, or at the end of his life in a psychiatric hospital.
The Seniors’tree of life
The particularity of this book is that the main character changes in each chapter, as well as the location and period of the story. The plot of the story is thus hard to define and it makes it even harder to read it until the end without getting lost or restarting the book.
This book can be read as if it was an adventure, as if we were detectives who were trying to walk on the path of these families through all these years. I found this novel quite interesting because Regina Porter denounces the racial tensions and discrimination of the time, that still exist today. Through her work and literature, she aims to denounce and to remind people who could have forgotten about segregation and about what black people had to endure at that time. I have really appreciated reading this book because it highlights a story about human relationships, about how black people were treated and how things have evolved over time. I recommend this book to all good readers with an appropriate level of English.