num_pages: 160
description: Using the intimate rhyme scheme of Byron's great picaresque Don Juan and the narrative devices of Pushkin's enduring Eugene Onegin D'Aguiar creates poetry dazzling in its inventiveness and wonder. Moving from the Civil War to the present day Bloodlines follows the lives of five characters each trying to escape the bonds of slavery. Among them is the narrator who knows neither of his parents because by the time he is born his black mother has been sold back into slavery and dies in childbirth and his white father has been indentured as a boxer in a traveling fair. Cursed by the thwarted love of his parents the narrator is condemned to bear witness until the races become equal. He speaks to us of his quest for freedom.
language: English
title: Bloodlines
publisher: Overlook Books