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Title details for Jazz Moon by Joe Okonkwo - Available

Jazz Moon

by Joe Okonkwo
ebook
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"A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris—a moving story of traveling far to find oneself" (David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife).

On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear music and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts dynamite from his horn. Ben finds himself drawn to the trumpeter—and to Paris, where Baby Back says everything is happening.

In Paris, black people are welcomed as exotic celebrities, especially those from Harlem. It's an easy life, but it quickly leaves Ben adrift and alone, craving solace through anonymous dalliances in the city's decadent underground scene. From chic Parisian cafés to seedy opium dens, his odyssey will bring new love, trials, and heartache, even as echoes from the past urge him to decide where true fulfillment and inspiration lie.

Jazz Moon is an evocative story of emotional and artistic awakening set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age–Paris—a winner of the Edmund White Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

"Jazz Moon mashes up essences of Hurston and Hughes and Fitzgerald into a heady mixtape of a romance: driving and rhythmic as an Armstrong Hot Five record, sensuous as the small of a Cotton Club chorus girl's back. I enjoyed it immensely." —Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird and Got 'til It's Gone

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 1, 2016

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781496701176
      • File size: 406 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781496701176
      • File size: 398 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      May 15, 2016
      Themes of trust, forgiveness, and respect permeate Okonkwo's sensitively written gay novel, a coming-of-age and coming-to-terms tale set in the 1920s, when jazz babies danced to Harlem's hot jazz, which is so prized in Paris, where jazz-trumpeter Baby Back yearns to go. Waiter-poet Ben is married and conflicted when he trades glances with another man. Soon after, Ben, delayed by guilt but holding tight to Baby's gift ticket, dashes to the ship that will take him and his lover to France. Their growing confidence from newfound acceptance is tested on board the Bonaparte when a racist white man fights Baby Back, until the captain intervenes, proclaiming, This is a French vessel, and in France we treat everyone with respect. Clinging to this morsel of freedom, Ben wonders if he can ever return to America. In Paris, while the coldly ambitious Baby rehearses in a small club, Ben delightedly explores Paris and practices Frenchbut to what end? Okonkwo has written a lovely debut novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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