There are many good reasons to like Swing Time. Its author, Zadie Smith, is everywhere these days with intelligent, thoughtful opinions on a variety of subjects. The book is about two girls growing up in a low-income area of Northwest London. One has a black mother and a white father; the other has a white mother and a black father. Much of the book takes place in West Africa, where the pop star one of the girls works for after college builds a school for girls, and several of the main characters are African.
 We need books with a broad range of characters and cultures like the ones here badly these days, especially when they go beyond having characters of different races and ethnicities come off as being wonderful, pure people who fight for just causes even as they’re oppressed. The characters in Swing Time are as flawed as anyone else.
 Swing Time is such a book, and that makes me feel bad for not liking it more. It’s good enough story telling and its 453 pages zipped by, but I didn’t find the poetry or dazzling writing I found in News of the World or The Girls. To me, Swing Time was another The Goldfinch, a book critics and most readers adored but that left me unmoved.