Saint Monkey
That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem--an offer she can't resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city--young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach.
Jacinda Townsend's remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction.
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Captures the imagination and the heart.--Jacinta Howard
Takes us backstage at the Apollo and into the smoky, late-night clubs where the art of jazz is fashioned before our eyes...The reader is buffeted by the transformative waves of race and music in America.--Jonathan Odell
[A] novel to curl up with...Irresistible.
An absolute marvel of a book. Jacinda Townsend is dazzling as she transports the reader to a different time and place.--Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger
This stunner of a novel--set in Kentucky just before Civil Rights blows Jim Crow to pieces--tracks the lives of two young black women, both outsiders, both searching, and the thorny friendship that holds them together.--Junot Díaz
