Reviews

Darwin's Ghosts by Ariel Dorfman

madorne's review against another edition

informative reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

abookishtype's review against another edition

4.0

Late in Ariel Dorfman’s philosophical novel Darwin’s Ghosts, a professor asks the protagonist, “who is not the product of some crime committed in the past?” This question summarizes all that Fitzroy Foster and his wife, Camilla Wood, discover about his ancestry after Foster’s fourteenth birthday when all photographs of him bizarrely show the face of a long-dead indigenous man from Tierra del Fuego. The quest to figure out how to “cure” Foster leads the pair to uncover the tragic, horrific history of the men and women who were kidnapped and displayed in human zoos in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration.