Babylon Rolling

May 26, 2008
Two visions of New Orleans: one you may recognize, the other—hopefully not.
Babylon Rolling
Amanda Boyden
. Pantheon
, $23.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-375-42533-2

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.

June 1, 2008
Threats of natural disaster bracket this novel of New Orleans, which opens just prior to Hurricane Ivan in September 2004 and ends with the ominous approach of Katrina the following summer. In the intervening year, certain residents of the Uptown district weather personal tragedies rivaling the impact of killer storms. Orchid Street, diverse by any standard, includes two African American families, upstanding senior citizens Roy and Cerise Brown and the more struggling Harrises, as well as a young family of well-meaning but clueless whites recently arrived from Minnesota, a half-mad gentlewoman of the old school, and the exotic, intellectual Gupta clan. Neighborhood bar Tokyo Rose serves all as both haven from and catalyst of neighborhood disturbances. As lives and cultures overlap, the author of "Pretty Little Dirty" melds an enticing sense of place and a kaleidoscope of distinctive voices into a cautionary tale of ambition, desire, and conflict. Perhaps there are too many voices: character development is notably uneven, and the level of mayhem, drunkenness, murder, corruption, and adultery occurring within 12 months on one street is not wholly convincing. However, Boyden writes with a style and flair that bear watching. Recommended for comprehensive fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 4/15/08.]Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2008
A family from Minneapolis relocates to New Orleans one year before Katrina and settles on Orchard Street, partly because it offers a rich human gumbo of whites, blacks, Asians, and Tulane students. The family members want to revel in the diversity, but they also recoil at some of the differences they encounter. At the same time, the marital stresses between husband and wife are deepening. Babylon Rolling is a chronicle of life on Orchard Street during that year before disaster. It is an engaging and keenly observant book, a kind of literary block party in which the residents of Orchard Street come to life. Whether Boydens focus is on a black teenager who embarks on a career in the drug trade by dubbing himself Fearius, or on the Minnesota transplants reactions to their new home, or on the fierce heat and humidity, or the wondrous smells that waft from kitchens, or racial tensions, there is an honesty and bedrock reality to this novel that is never less than compelling. Boydens Pretty Little Dirty (2006) was a first novel of promise. Babylon Rolling fulfills that promise.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)