From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This author is a feminist writer who has several non-fiction books out there. I have not read any of those. This one appears to be her first foray into fiction, and I have to say right up front that I was not at all impressed by it. For me it was a mess. It was hard to follow, choppily-written, jumping back and forth in time with little warning, flooded with characters that were not well-defined and therefore largely interchangeable, it was tedious at times, and did nothing whatsoever to draw me in, to enable me to empathize with the main character, or to engage or entertain me. I DNF'd it at 25% (and some skimming of the other 75%) because I was bored to tears with it and thoroughly disappointed at such a wasted opportunity.
The story is supposedly an homage to Rosetta Tharpe, but it feels more like an insult. The real-life Tharpe was truly a revolutionary who rose to popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, was an innovative musician and a huge influence on Blues, and helped bring Gospel into the mainstream, but this book doesn't seem to have any focus at all, and is music-light. By that I mean that, while an ebook (as opposed to an audio-book, for example) doesn't exactly lend itself to musical interludes, you can talk about music with passion and give it some character and life. Music was supposed to be a character in this novel in a very real sense, judged from the book description, but it was a complete no-show in that first 25%.
There was a lot of talk around music, but no talk, experience, or any sort of feel at all for music. So the book that was supposed to be about a musician turned her into a rather stereotypical shell - an echo of a musician rather then a working musician who purportedly was talented. Yes, we're told she was on the down-slide, and was a much imitated musician, but we were given no sort of sense of why she was imitated or what she had been before she hit the slope - not in the portion I read anyway.
To me, the novel felt like a fraud, like this was a band trying to break into the big time rather than a respected musician who'd had a series of bad breaks. Worse than that, it was all over the place and it lost me repeatedly as I tried to follow it and engage with it. I have to say it was also racist in some ways, in a warped mirror sort of way, which is the same distorted reflection that lets black comedians, for example tell racist white jokes on stage, but condemns white comedians who do the same about people of color.
You can't have it both ways. If racism is bad - and it is - you can't allow it for people of one color while denying it for others. It needs to be anathema for all, and this book didn't seem to get that. On the one hand it rightly sought to condemn racism, but it did it in such a back-handed and hamfisted manner that it became more like a parody than a paradigm. It became an exemplar of the very thing it was supposed to be deriding. For these reasons, I can't commend it based on what I read of it.
