Babylon Rolling
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the acclaimed debut Pretty Little Dirty comes a complex, seductive novel about race and culture, set in New Orleans.
Babylon Rolling is a glittering, gritty, unflinching novel of five families living along an Uptown block in the year before Hurricane Katrina. Told in numerous voices, it explores what happens when forces collide in the boozy, humid city that care forgot. At once an exploration of ethnicity and a portrait of a city on the edge of annihilation, Babylon Rolling is a brave and masterful novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two visions of New Orleans: one you may recognize, the other hopefully not.Babylon RollingAmanda Boyden. Pantheon, (320p) 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 "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.
