Angels of Detroit
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Once an example of American industrial might, Detroit has gone bankrupt, its streets dark, its storefronts vacant. Miles of city blocks lie empty, saplings growing through the cracked foundations of abandoned buildings.
In razor-sharp, beguiling prose, Angels of Detroit draws us into the lives of multiple characters struggling to define their futures in this desolate landscape: a scrappy group of activists trying to save the city with placards and protests; a curious child who knows the blighted city as her own personal playground; an elderly great-grandmother eking out a community garden in an oil-soaked patch of dirt; a carpenter with an explosive idea of how to give the city a new start; a confused idealist who has stumbled into debt to a human trafficker; a weary corporate executive who believes she is doing right by the city she remembers at its prime--each of their desires is distinct, and their visions for a better city are on a collision course.
In this propulsive, masterfully plotted epic, an urban wasteland whose history is plagued with riots and unrest is reimagined as an ambiguous new frontier--a site of tenacity and possible hope. Driven by struggle and suspense, and shot through with a startling empathy, Christopher Hebert's magnificent second novel unspools an American story for our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hebert's second novel (after The Boiling Season) is a gritty portrayal of Detroit as a crumbling industrial city that has become an economic and social wasteland, sparsely populated by unfortunate people who have nowhere else to go. The Motor City has been virtually abandoned by industries, businesses, and residents, "a landscape full of monuments to loss and oblivion," leaving those few who remain resigned to despair. Hebert tells this story through the interactions of 11 major characters whose lives intersect in subtle and suspenseful ways. Dobbs is a hapless drifter unwillingly involved with human traffickers. Constance is a great-grandmother trying to coax a vegetable garden out of toxic soil. Michael is a carpenter with explosive ideas for cleansing the city. Mrs. Freeman is a corporate shill with a guilty conscience. Clementine is a 10-year-old girl with vacant neighborhoods as her playground. An insecure corporate security guard and five young, idealistic, inept anti-corporate urban terrorists round out this crafty morality tale of good people making bad decisions. Nobody pays any attention to these people; the five young terrorists can't even get the cops to come to their amateur protest demonstrations. But then somebody starts blowing up empty buildings. Hebert wonderfully brings out his ensemble's human qualities, whether they're fearful, compassionate, or tenacious.
