How long does it take to read Abeng?
a novel
Abeng by Michelle Cliff takes about 3 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 4 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1983. 167 pages, about 45,925 words. Written for young adults.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 6 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 4 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 55 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Her novels evoke both the clearly delineated hierarchies of colonial Jamaica and the subtleties of present-day island life. Nowhere is her power felt more than in Clare Savage, her Jamaican heroine, who appeared, already grown, in No Telephone to Heaven. Abeng is a kind of prequel to that highly-acclaimed novel and is a small masterpiece in its own right. Here Clare is twelve years old, the light-skinned daughter of a middle-class family, growing up among the complex contradictions of class versus color, blood versus history, harsh reality versus delusion, in a colonized country. In language that surrounds us with a richness of meaning and voices, the several strands of young Clare's heritage are explored: the Maroons, who used the conch shell—the abeng—to pass messages as they fought a guerilla struggle against their English enslavers; and the legacy of Clare's white great-great-grandfather, Judge Savage, who burned his hundred slaves on the eve of their emancipation. A lyrical, explosive coming-of-age story combined with a provocative retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica, this novel is a triumph.
Subjects: Femininity, Feminism, Fiction, History, Politics and government, Social life and customs
