Augustown

Review by New York Times Review

AUGUSTOWN, by Kei Miller. (Vintage, $16.) When Kaia, a schoolboy, comes home with his dreadlocks shorn off - a violation of his Rastafari beliefs - his town in Jamaica erupts, setting in motion a reckoning of the humiliations its people have suffered at the hands of the establishment, which they call Babylon. "Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem," our reviewer, V. V. Ganeshananthan, wrote. THE UPSTARTS: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley, by Brad Stone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) Stone, of Bloomberg News, offers a balanced view of these companies' spectacular rise: On one side, the disruption ushered in a new era of freedom regarding the services people use; on the other, the start-ups' growth represents "the overweening hubris of the techno-elite." THE ROMANCE READER'S GUIDE TO LIFE, by Sharon Pywell. (Flatiron, $16.99.) The plot of a purloined novel, "The Pirate Lover," runs parallel to the lives of Neave and Lilly, two sisters in working-class Massachusetts. An unusual narrative device - Lilly's sections are told from beyond the grave - helps keep the story interesting, and Pywell clearly has fun riffing on the romance genre's tropes and overstuffed language. THE STORIED CITY: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, by Charlie English. (Riverhead, $17.) Timbuktu, in Mali, had long been home to thousands of ancient African documents on everything from politics to science to religion. When A1 Qaeda arrived in 2012, intent on destroying anything that did not adhere to its vision of Islam, a heroic effort was started to move and save the manuscripts. English places this story of Timbuktu's libraries in the city's remarkable history. SYMPATHY, by Olivia Sudjic. (Mariner, $14.99.) After Alice Hare, a lonely and adrift 23-year-old, arrives in New York from London, she becomes infatuated via social media with Mizuko, a Japanese writer. As Alice's obsession intensifies, she attempts to force a friendship - to a devastating end. This debut novel deals with the particular heartbreak of unrequited affection and jilted friendship in the internet age. AMERICAN ORIGINALITY: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Glück. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The author, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, assesses contemporary poetry in this brief volume, with an eye to broader questions of American identity. Our reviewer, Craig Morgan Teicher, praised the collection, writing, "In the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 20, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* As both the introductory note and epithet doubly insist, August Town, divided into two words, is a real town in Jamaica, made (in)famous for being the founding home of Bedwardism, a short-lived, early twentieth-century religion. Fast-forward to 1982 when teary Kaia comes home to his grandmother-cum-great-aunt Ma Taffy with his dreadlocks, the Rasta symbol of his Nazirite vow, hacked off by his teacher who claims his hair is a sign of insolence. Attempting to calm the bewildered child as well as herself, Ma Taffy imparts the story of the flying preacherman, the charlatan-turned-prophet Alexander Bedward. The racial, political, economic dissonance back then remains just as stifling decades later, repeatedly played out in the lives of Augustown-ies, especially Kaia's mother, who was supposed to thrive, not just survive. Look, this isn't magic realism . . . . This is a story about people as real as you are, Jamaican-born, London-domiciled Miller (The Last Warner Woman, 2012) warns through his indelible characters. You may as well stop to consider . . . whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in. Fusing facts with what-could-have-well-been, Augustown is a gorgeously plotted, sharply convincing, achingly urgent novel deserving widespread attention.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Jamaican novelist and poet Miller (The Last Warner Woman) presents a rueful portrait of the enduring struggle between those who reject an impoverished life on his native island and the forces that hold them in check, what the rastafari call Babylon. The year is 1982, and a teacher cuts the dreadlocks off a child named Kaia because he looks "like some dirty little African." Ma Taffy, Kaia's aunt, comforts him with the story of Bedward, an Augustown preacher and forerunner of the rastafari. Sixty years earlier, Bedward's miraculous attempt "'to rise up into de skies like Elijah'" was halted by the "Babylon boys" pulling him down "with a long hooker stick." Like Bedward, Kaia's mother believes she might escape: the principal of the school has been tutoring her, and after the local college accepts her application, "a certain lightness of being" takes her over, "as if she could close her eyes right now and begin to rise." After seeing Kaia's bald head, though, she is instead forced into a confrontation with Babylon. In the end, there is no avoiding "the stone" Ma Taffy describes the poor people of Augustown being born with, "the one that always stop we from rising." The flashback is telling of Miller's talent for infusing his lyrical descriptions of the island's present with the weight of its history. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 2014, Jamaican author Miller's The Cartographer Tries To Map a Way to Zion won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry, and Miller's new novel uses assured poetic language to create important historical intersections and strong, realistic characters. The poor Jamaican town of the title features many interesting figures, including Ma Taffy, who is raising grandnephew Kaia; Clarky, the -fruit-selling Rastaman; and Bedward, the sinner-turned-saint, who levitated before the eyes of his congregation. The book opens with Kaia returning home from school, his long locs completely gone after his ill-tempered teacher shaved them off, knowing their importance in Rasta culture. The style recalls magical realism, but the novel as a whole is more a blend of folklore representing Africans of the diaspora and their creative use of mythos to survive hardship. Miller also explores Jamaica's racial and economic rifts and the ensuing violence without being preachy, instead working through his characters' experiences. VERDICT Highly recommended, and not just for lovers of African and Caribbean folklore. This book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in fiction that's grounded in community.-Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A boy's schoolroom punishment opens a window into the roiling, mystical history of a Jamaican community.When Kaia arrives at the home of his great-aunt Ma Taffy from school with his dreadlocks shorn off, it's more than a case of a teacher taking discipline too far. It's a direct attack on the family's Rastafarian heritage, and the incident prompts Ma Taffy to think back on the history of Kingston's Augustown neighborhood and the persecutions two generations past. More specifically, she recalls the story of Alexander Bedward, a proto-Rastafari preacher who in the 1920s captivated the island with rumors that he was able to levitate. And, just as Bedward was attacked by the then-ruling British government threatened by his popularity, Miller suggests that the bigotry persisted into 1982, when the story is set. Miller's excellent third novel is built on sharp, sensitive portraits of key players in what at first seems a minor incident, from Ma Taffy and Bedward to Kaia's teacher, the school principal, and neighborhood gangsters, each of whom are fending off personal and cultural misunderstandings. To that end, they're all subject to the concept of "autoclaps," Jamaican slang for calamity; Miller returns to this point often, and storytelling suggests that Augustown (based on the real August Town) is a place where the other shoe keeps dropping. Miller insists that Bedward's floating not be interpreted as sprightly magical realism but as a symbol for how the place is misunderstood and how such misunderstandings feed into needless violence: "Consider...not whether you believe in this story or not," he writes, "but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in." Despite the novel's relative brevity, Miller captures the ways community, faith, and class create a variety of cultural microclimates. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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First you must imagine the sky, blue and cloudless if that helps, or else the luminously black spread of night. Next--and this is the important bit--you must imagine yourself inside it. Inside the sky, floating beside me. Below us, the green and blue disc of the earth.   Now focus. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. We have gone inland. Down there is a dismal little valley on a dismal little island. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar--a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin--as if a kind of ruin has befallen them.   Seen from up here, the ramshackle valley looks like a pot of cornmeal porridge, rusting tin roofs stirred into its hot, bubbling vortex. Perhaps it is the dust bowls, the tracts of sand and the dry riverbed that give the place this cornmeally look. The streets run in unplanned and sometimes maze-like directions; paved roads often thin into dirt paths; wide streets narrow into alleys lined with zinc or scrap-board fences. If solid concrete houses rise like sentinels at the beginning of a road, the architecture will devolve into clumsy board shacks by the time you get to the cul-de-sac. If on one road the houses are separated into tidy lots, on the road just over they are crowded together and lean into each other as if for comfort. This is a community that does not quite come together.   We must imagine there was a time when all of this was beautiful and unscarred; a time when the hills were whole and green--verdant humps rolling up towards the Blue Mountain range above; a time when the valley was thick with guava trees, when wild parakeets flew above the forest and fat iguanas sunbathed on river-smoothed rocks. But that is all we can do. Imagine. There is no forest any more, and no more iguanas, and the mineral river that once flowed swiftly through the valley is now dammed up, its waters diverted to the city's reservoir. Where there was once a perfect green hill, there is now a scar, and where there was once a river, there is now just a dry riverbed, little boys playing football among its vast sands. Where there once was beauty, now there is just "Augustown," or sometimes "Greater Augustown" if you listen to the island's city officials, who have seen fit to attach to it, like addendums, the nearby districts of Kintyre, Rockers, Bryce Hill, Dread Heights and "Gola.   Down there it is 11 April 1982, a day I have watched over and over again, as if from up here I could change things; could slip inside its hours and change the outcome. But I can only watch.   For here is the truth: each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exag­geration to say that every day contains all of history. Excerpted from Augustown by Kei Miller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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