Such Sweet Thunder

Reviews / Votes

A vibrant portrait of African-American life at the nation's crossroads . . . belongs with other enduring documentaries of the dispossessed, like Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Langston Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter * New York Times Book Review * A rousing, inspired work, keenly observed and soulful . . . The novel sparkles with life, soaring with the loose flow of a jazzy improvisation. More akin in style to Charles Dickens than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Carter writes prose that tingles with detail . . . a rich addition to our literary understanding of the 20th-century African-American experience * The Boston Globe * This hefty, astonishing novel by a Black American expatriate who died in 1983 tells - in electric modernist vernacular prose - the story of a black child's life in Jim Crow America . . .Through a steady accumulation of detail, sustained lyricism, flights of fancy and, especially, reams of swinging dialogue, Carter paints an uncommonly rich picture of Black American family life in the early 20th century. Like the composition it is named for, a Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn tribute to Shakespeare, it is a marvelous blend of jazz rhythms and high literary tradition * Publishers Weekly * Sprawling and searching, it is Dickensian or even Joycean in scope . . .This novel is not only a Bildungsroman but also a road map - an atlas that points the way to both the heartland and the human heart * The Kansas City Star * An extraordinarily honest and compassionate child's-eye view of a world too seldom seen in American fiction * Kirkus Reviews * Echoes of Faulkner, Twain and Joyce . . . For its lyrical rendering of a time and place long vanished, this is a book to savor, slowly * Entertainment Weekly * Dreamy, nostalgic, and lyrical writing . . . a stirring portrait of a young boy growing up * Booklist (starred review) * Infused with the sounds and spirit of Kansas City jazz, the author's gritty style was ahead of its time * Library Journal * Carter bridges Zora Neale Hurston's folkloric narratives and Toni Morrison's communal spirituals . . . Few works are so insistently frank about a boy's proto-sexual, innocent but instinctive yearnings * National Post (Canada) * It is seldom that one comes across a book that dazzles and surprises, a book that will surely withstand the test of time. Such Sweet Thunder is such a book * Santa Fe New Mexican * A kaleidoscopic stream of events; a cacophony of sounds and voices, smells and sights; and a tapestry of sensuality * Los Angeles Review of Books * The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time to a racially segregated Kansas City in the late 1920s . . . Seamlessly, gently, Such Sweet Thunder carries Amerigo and us through adolescence, first love and the edge of world war and its sad demands on the safe, secure world Amerigo had come to love . . . Carter connects all of our childhoods to Amerigo's, while making us feel intensely what made his childhood - Carter's childhood, presumably - as special as it was * New York Newsday * Spiraling and powerful . . . Carter paints a rich, jazz-like portrait of pre-World War II life in Black America . . . By fusing the best European modernist literary traditions with African American ones, Carter weaves a colorful, distinctive tapestry of a seminal period in African American history * Seattle Skanner * Such Sweet Thunder is Carter's Portrait of the Artist . . . Dedicated to musical giant Duke Ellington, the book is a jazz mix of sounds and sensations - the phonograph in the living room, the slamming of screen doors up and down his alley, trams clacking down the boulevard, the rhythms and rhymes of his young parents' enthusiastic speech. * Rain Taxi *