Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

I could not connect to this book at all. It is about a group of black jazz musicians in Europe during the Second World War and follows their struggle to survive as a group and as individuals. I found the characters unrealistic and hard to engage with and the plot surprisingly boring given the subject matter. The writing is good and the dialogue (which is written in an American patois) consistent and natural but I felt a real distance from the story. Theoretically, this is a good book but for me this didn't work in practice.