The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel,Used

Product DescriptionThe Celestial Jukebox is set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar. Cynthia Shearer's rural south is dependent on the rather less attractive fruits of capitalism, including agribusiness, gambling, and the dwindling vices surrounding the retail trades. The mood, the emotional weather these days, feels like a very humid melancholy. Into this weather comes Boubacar, a 15yearold by from Africa, joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area, new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a small town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, straggling members of the original white families of the area, and unsorted others.In America, Boubacar sees a shining National Steel guitar in the window of a pawn shop in town and visits The Celestial Grocery, the virtual city center presided over by a cranky secondgeneration Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox that often hoards its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson, stuck on the same sad Louvin Brothers song. The tie that binds all these lives is American popular music, its origins and its power.The purity and beauty of the writing marks this book as that most rare novel, filled with music, struggle, and spontaneous joy.From Publishers WeeklyA crotchety old ChineseAmerican man sweeps up brilliant pink blossoms as cats weave about his skinny legs, and dreams of a dance with a Honduran lady in white keds; a middleaged farmer fights the onslaught of what passes for progress and examines what may be the end of his marriage; a young woman of color examines her past and seeks to capture the sad music of the Delta on film; a young Mauritanian man, freely come to Mississippi from Africa, finds both wonder and confusion in this loud, bright new land, as he longs after an old steel guitar in a pawnshop window and falls further in love with the blues of the American kaffir. A nolongersoyoung mother fights her sense of invisibility in her family's life and is suddenly visible to someone forbidden. The damaged, fey Bebe Marie crafts her birdhouses of bottlecaps and fills her crumbling walls with images and poetry: "This is the orchard of abandoned dreams." Weaving it all together is music: the blues, jazz, the river of sound and emotion whose current flows worldwide, with unexpected effect. Shearer (The Wonder Book of the Air) has crafted a lyrical, floating world of an imagined Delta town that could not and does not exist, but perhaps should. Her touching characters and the beauty of her language overshadow any issue of pacing or selfconscious preciousness that threaten it, often rising to the level of prose poetry. A must for readers of modern serious fiction; a joy to the ear; a return to beauty in literature; it needs only a true spiritual dimension to achieve greatness.Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.From BooklistSooner or later everyone around Madagascar, Mississippi, comes to the Celestial Grocery, run by Angus Chien, a secondgeneration Chinese man. The centerpiece of the grocery is the jukebox, never updated or repaired since its installation in 1938. Angus keeps coins on top of the machine to use, because you can press the button but you don't always get what you ask for. The various characters, whose stories eventually include a trip to the grocery, are used to disappointments. Boubacar, "fresh off the boat" from Mauritania, learns that America means "being enriched and robbed at the same time." Raine learns that the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood is not always so perfect. And Angus learns that there is more than one way to break a heart. The thread that holds all these people together is the music of Slim Harpo, Son House, Sol Hoopii, and Bob Dylan. Shearer (The Wonder Book of Air, 1997) has created nothing less than a gem in this tale of intertwining destinies. Elizabeth DickieCopyright