The Jazz Palace

Starred review from April 27, 2015
Morris's first novel since 2004 puts her many gifts to use in a story of creativity, music, resilience, and love in Prohibition-era Chicago. In 1915, Benny Lehrman and Pearl Chimbrova encounter each other as teenagers as the SS Eastland sinks before their eyes, with three of Pearl's brothers aboard. In the years that follow, Bennyâwho feels dogged by tragedyâgrows up fascinated not by Lehrman's Caps, the factory he is expected to run some day, but by the nascent musical genre called "jass." Recognizing Benny's talent as pianist and composer, trumpeter Napoleon Hill takes Benny to play beside him at the Jazz Palace, the speakeasy Pearl has created to help take care of her siblings. Music helps all three prosper, but it can't protect them from the privations of the Depression, the violence of the mob, or the barriers of discrimination. Meanwhile, Pearl and Benny are drawn to each other, but Benny's self-doubt and Pearl's seductive younger sister, Opal, complicate their relationship. As fluid and nuanced as the music it celebrates, Morris's narrative brings physical details, the power of music, and the sweeping history of Chicago (the author's hometown) to memorable life. Real events and figures weave seamlessly into the lives of three characters fighting to claim their authentic identities despite family, cultural, and inner resistance.

February 15, 2015
A panoramic portrait of jazz-era Chicago, where, against a background of speak-easies, racial tension and gangsters, a Jewish boy with a talent for "the devil's music" observes and participates in the vibrancy of the day.Chicago in 1915, inspiration for local writer L. Frank Baum's Oz, "a place where you could package beef, ship wheat and make a fortune," emerges as perhaps the most memorable character in Morris' (The River Queen, 2007, etc.) new novel. Herself Chicago-raised, the author moves fluidly among the city's beachfronts and back streets, nightclubs and sweatshops, introducing a sizable cast of characters but focusing on three in particular. The first is Benny Lehrman, born with the century, an instinctive jazz pianist and composer. He first crosses paths with Pearl Chimbrova when both are children, on the fateful day the steamship Eastland sinks in the river, killing 844 people, including three of Pearl's brothers. Last there is Napoleon Hill, a black jazz trumpeter whose struggles and defiance are part of the novel's emphasis on racial injustice. All three seek escape, Benny and Napoleon in their music, Pearl in the deep waters of Lake Michigan, where she swims. Their destinies are intertwined with the city's history, evoked by Morris through events large and small and the presence of famous figures: Rudolf Valentino, Louis Armstrong, Leopold and Loeb, and, of course, Al Capone. Sometimes evocative, sometimes overburdened by research, this is fiction as urban biography, the city's hectic years connected via the hazy, overlapping fates of three particular faces in the crowd.Atmospheric but amorphous, Morris' restless novel works hard to encompass a cultural moment.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
Born in Chicago, highly regarded novelist and travel writer Morris (The River Queen, 2007) plunges readers into that brash city's roughneck, volcanically creative past in this transfixing novel. The historically accurate opening scene re-creates the shock and tragedy of the 1915 Eastland disaster, in which the top-heavy river steamship capsizes at the dock, drowning hundreds of summer revelers. Among the horrified witnesses is Benny, a rebellious Jewish boy and gifted piano player shadowed by the earlier death of a younger brother, and Pearl, also Jewish, who has just lost three brothers who were on board. As Morris follows Benny and Pearl's difficult paths forward, she brings in Napoleon, an African American trumpeter who leaves New Orleans for the jazz clubs of Chicago. While Benny becomes enthralled by this strange new music, Pearl turns her family's failing shop into a profitable speakeasy. Not only does Morris, rhapsodically fluent in the liberating innovations of jazz, vividly convey the passion to make music that rules the precarious lives of Benny and Napoleon. She also turns this tale of brutal hardships and stubborn dreams into a lush, swirling, evocative jazz composition, in which she sensitively depicts a city-in-flux shaped by poverty and romance, immigrants and migrants, anti-Semitism and racism, visionaries and gangsters. A graceful and involving affirmation of the transcendent power of art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2014

Morris, a fine writer of long fiction (from Crossroads to Revenge), short fiction, and travel memoir, offers a grandly conceived novel that's nearly 20 years in the making. In Jazz Age Chicago, two Jewish families suffer tragedy, with the Lehrmans losing a son in a blizzard and the Chimbrovas three sons with the 1915 sinking of the SS Eastland. Despite the pressure, young Benny Lehrman is less interested in continuing the family's hat business than in indulging his passion for jazz.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.