Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Amity Public Library | FIC BOYDEN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the author of Pretty Little Dirty comes a gritty, unflinching story about the clash of race and culture in the intersecting lives of five families who call the same New Orleans street home.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former contortionist and trapeze artist Boyden (Pretty Little Dirty) invokes an array of New Orleans voices on Uptown's Orchid Street. Daniel Harris, a smalltime teenage drug dealer who goes by "Fearius," hopes "[t]oday gone be his day" and the coming Hurricane Ivan will drive junkies into a stockpiling frenzy. Although his voice more often mimics street patois than evokes his character, language crystallizes with character in his white neighbor, the 57-year-old Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges, who seeks to divest her neighborhood of undesirables. Orchid Street's Minneapolis transplants, Ed Flank and Ariel May, meanwhile, struggle to maintain a family in an American Babylon that batters and woos with delights and disasters. Into the mix move the Guptas, an Indian family who have a difficult time breaking the ice. Though it could lose some extraneous passages, the book's nuanced story of people who "choose to live... inside the big lasso of river" reveals a side of the Crescent City not often seen in fiction. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Big Doins in the Big Easy: Racial and domestic tensions play out against the backdrop of Hurricane Ivan, the Tokyo Rose Bar and La Belle Nouvelle, a French Quarter hotel. Ed Flank and Ariel May (and their two children, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis May) have recently moved from Minnesota to New Orleans so Ariel can manage La Belle Nouvelle--and she gets much more than she bargained for. While she's preoccupied with the hotel, Miles starts to turn into a seven-year-old homeboy, and Ed, a Buddhist, is barely managing to keep his cool in the heat of the city. The ethnically diverse neighborhood they move into--far different from the homogeneity of the North--includes the Guptas, an academic couple from India; Cerise, a woman who from her perch on her front porch has for years watched the neighborhood drama unfold before her eyes; Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges (aka "Prancie"), who keeps a journal that chronicles her growing dementia; and Sharon Harris, whose two sons, Michael and Daniel (street names Muzzle and Fearius), succumb to life on the streets by getting mixed up with dope-dealer Alphonse. As Hurricane Ivan approaches, the psychological tension ratchets up several notches. While Ed and the children leave with the Guptas to escape Ivan, Ariel stays behind to cater to guests wanting to party up a storm, as it were. Ariel has been finding herself erotically attracted to Javier, the young sous chef at the hotel's restaurant, and Ed's absence allows her to act on her impulses, a decision she comes to regret later when Javier contemplates suing her for sexual harassment. Boyden (Pretty Little Dirty, 2006, etc.) inhabits a number of voices over the course of the narrative. Fearius, for example, "dont wanna rap with slow boy Boo, but it aint a good idea if he perch hisself on some neighbor stoop." After some intense emotional interaction, the novel devolves into a dissatisfying and somewhat unbelievable conclusion of killing and reconciliation. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A family from Minneapolis relocates to New Orleans one year before Katrina and settles on Orchard Street, partly because it offers a rich human gumbo of whites, blacks, Asians, and Tulane students. The family members want to revel in the diversity, but they also recoil at some of the differences they encounter. At the same time, the marital stresses between husband and wife are deepening. Babylon Rolling is a chronicle of life on Orchard Street during that year before disaster. It is an engaging and keenly observant book, a kind of literary block party in which the residents of Orchard Street come to life. Whether Boyden's focus is on a black teenager who embarks on a career in the drug trade by dubbing himself Fearius, or on the Minnesota transplants' reactions to their new home, or on the fierce heat and humidity, or the wondrous smells that waft from kitchens, or racial tensions, there is an honesty and bedrock reality to this novel that is never less than compelling. Boyden's Pretty Little Dirty (2006) was a first novel of promise. Babylon Rolling fulfills that promise.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Threats of natural disaster bracket this novel of New Orleans, which opens just prior to Hurricane Ivan in September 2004 and ends with the ominous approach of Katrina the following summer. In the intervening year, certain residents of the Uptown district weather personal tragedies rivaling the impact of killer storms. Orchid Street, diverse by any standard, includes two African American families, upstanding senior citizens Roy and Cerise Brown and the more struggling Harrises, as well as a young family of well-meaning but clueless whites recently arrived from Minnesota, a half-mad gentlewoman of the old school, and the exotic, intellectual Gupta clan. Neighborhood bar Tokyo Rose serves all as both haven from and catalyst of neighborhood disturbances. As lives and cultures overlap, the author of Pretty Little Dirty melds an enticing sense of place and a kaleidoscope of distinctive voices into a cautionary tale of ambition, desire, and conflict. Perhaps there are too many voices: character development is notably uneven, and the level of mayhem, drunkenness, murder, corruption, and adultery occurring within 12 months on one street is not wholly convincing. However, Boyden writes with a style and flair that bear watching. Recommended for comprehensive fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/08.]--Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.