Book ~ "Memoirs of a Dead White Chick" (2015) Lennox Randon

From Goodreads ~ It began as one of those days when I asked myself, what else could go wrong?

And then I died.

Eleanor, a harried, middle-aged White female elementary schoolteacher (and former police officer), begins her day by dying in the year 1999.

Somehow, while her essence is en route to wherever one’s essence goes upon death, she inadvertently ends up occupying the body of a 16-year-old Black male in 1858 Philadelphia.

Not only does she have to deal with the obvious gender, race and time period changes but she also has to figure out whether, when lives are at stake, she should interfere with history as she knows it.

Eleanor is a white female 41-year-old teacher in 1999 in Houston.  She is killed in a car accident on her way to school one day ... and wakes up in 1858 as a 16-year-old black man in Philadelphia named Matthew.  Matthew's family is poor and he and father make a living on the docks.  Even though she is now in Matthew's body, Eleanor still has her memories, speech pattern and knowledge, which helps Matthew get a job in an office.  This leads him to become involved with abolitionists  Harriet Tubman and John Brown in the fight to end slavery (Matthew and his family are free blacks) and the potential of changing the future.

I like reading books about time travel so that's why this one caught my eye.  I thought it was an interesting concept of having a middle-aged white woman go back in time and become a young black man.

I liked the writing style.  It was a bit funny and sarcastic.  It was written in first person perspective from Eleanor and Matthew's points of view.

I found that once Matthew got hooked up with John Brown the pace of the book slowed down and it was a bit draggy and the content more heavy.  I didn't know who Tubman or Brown were and had never heard about the Harper Ferry Raid.  And not being an American, I didn't know the history ... apparently Brown played a major role in the start of the American Civil War.