Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
A Novel
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4.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
GMA BUZZ PICK • How do we find belonging when love is unrequited? A "gorgeously written debut" (Celeste Ng, best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere) filled with jazz and soul, about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer—trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man—as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices.
“Elegant, unexpected and…unforgettable.” —New York Times Book Review
“A modern masterpiece.” —Jason Reynolds, best-selling author of Look Both Ways
It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life.
Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus. Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A solitary jazz musician creates chaos for the women in his life in this haunting debut novel. Circus Palmer makes beautiful music with his trumpet but plays fast and loose with everyone who cares for him and always leaves lasting emotional damage in his wake. Even so, Palmer is rarely the focus of author Laura Warrell’s episodic story—she’s more interested in the women whose lives he crashes into and how that affects their own thoughts on love and relationships. We were especially drawn to his only daughter, Koko, coming of age in the shadow of a father both missing in action and larger than life. These women’s voices make up a powerful, emotional chorus singing a lovelorn song that’s very relatable. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a deeply touching novel, and Warrell feels like a powerful new voice in modern fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warrell unfurls in her engaging debut the story of a peripatetic trumpet player. Circus Palmer, a touring 40-year-old jazz musician and lothario, has recently learned in Miami that his main love interest, drummer Maggie Swan, is pregnant. Circus, ever the ladies' man, panics, rushing back to his home turf in Boston ("It was the going he liked, liked the unclasping of links, liked getting to whatever was waiting at the other end of leaving," Warrell writes). His former wife, Pia, still quietly clinging to hope for reconciliation, manages to keep him involved in raising their 15-year-old daughter, Koko, who's beginning to have her sexual awakening. Meanwhile, a long-awaited meeting with a producer ends badly for Circus, sending him on a bender. Soon thereafter, Circus, pining for Maggie, visits instead a girlfriend in Providence, a trip that irrevocably alters his future. The author evocatively describes the women who inspire Circus's music and his lust—one brings his playing to ecstatic heights by shimmying her shoulders; another makes his horn "coo" with her "girlish giggle"—and finds the sadness deep in his heart. Warrell hits all the right notes.
