Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: African American Urban Fiction

REMEDY for a BROKEN ANGEL by Toni Ann Johnson – Latino American Literature, Black and African American Urban Fiction, Mothers and Children Fiction

Remedy for a Broken Angel by Toni Ann Johnson is an intense examination of the troubled personal histories of two beautiful and talented women of color.

Their stories are told in alternating chapters which reveal the mother’s and her daughter’s attempts to reclaim and understand their broken pasts. Each chapter is a revelation into the pain and damage caused by unknown family secrets. Both women struggle with a legacy of shame and self-blame for the price they’re paying for never hearing the truth. Each must learn the lessons found in past years of failure to communicate.

The beautiful mother, Serena, is a successful Bermudian jazz singer and songwriter who is consumed by anger over feeling unloved as a child. Years later, her hurt and confusion over being abandoned by her family cause her to repeat the past by leaving her own marriage and abandoning her twelve-year-old daughter.

Artie, Serena’s lovely daughter, is an excellent photographer who constantly battles with the same destructive demons of abandonment, loss, shame, and betrayal as does her mother. She finds herself at age twenty-six in a psychiatric hospital in Malibu, California. There, she receives caring support from her psychiatrist, Dr. Phoebe Ligon, in trying to understand her rage and need for revenge against Serena.

Serena’s and Artie’s struggles through the years are a deep, painful journey as they each must try to learn to forgive the other. Somehow, they must bridge the chasm of mutual feelings of betrayal caused by misconceptions, falsehoods, and many lost years with no communication.

Remedy for a Broken Angel is an extraordinary novel about digging out from years of suppression to find forgiveness and to forgive. Johnson writes with authority about the world in which the characters in her novel live as they endure an endless struggle for the truth. She deftly exposes the many faces of patterns of abuse and how the “unseen hand” perpetuates and feeds the demons within in this literary work of contemporary women’s fiction from Nortia Press.

Remedy for a Broken Angel by Toni Ann Johnson was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She won the 2015 International Latino Book Award for Most Inspirational Fiction and is a winner of a Humanitas Prize for promoting human dignity for her screenplay, Ruby Bridges. Johnson’s professional experience in dance, music, film and stage production lends authenticity to the sonorous background and subtext of the work. As you read Remedy for a Broken Angel, you might just hear the strains of jazz composer Charles Mingus’ music seeping throughout Johnson’s novel in its refrains and riffs of the complications of relationships.

December 15, 2021
BISHOP’S LAW by Rafael Amadeus Hines – African American Urban Fiction, War Fiction, Thriller/Suspense

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. This is the code that John Bishop, one of America’s most decorated military heroes, teaches his men to follow whether they’re on a mission in the heat of the Middle East or in the jungle that is New York’s Lower East Side in Rafael Amadeus Hines’ novel, Bishop’s Law.

To say his life is complicated is putting it mildly. In this second volume of the John Bishop series, several high-level assassins are hell-bent on killing him for his actions as a soldier. At the same time, he’s deep in his crime family’s military-style battles against various opponents’ groups. All these forces are closing in on him simultaneously, even as the United States government had hired him and his family to protect the country from bad guys using whatever means necessary.

Complicated? You bet. But if you crave non-stop action, ultra-violence, and high body counts in your novel-reading this fall, this is a great place to start.

Part Panamanian, part Jamaican with amber eyes, his face forever scarred in an assassin’s attack that killed his parents when he was nine, Bishop is related by blood to the powerful Valdez crime family. He learned from them—the ability to act, lead, protect his men at all costs—served him well as a Special Forces soldier who fought in the Middle East against a host of bad actors. By the time the story begins, Bishop has returned from overseas, living with Maria, his childhood sweetheart, and about to become a father. He dreams of leaving his military life behind but instead finds himself helping the Valdez family in a significant military-style action against Russians on New York’s Lower East Side.

The complications are only starting.

While setting up the military engagement with the Russians, he also finds out that his previous actions in the Middle East have earned him the wrath of some of the world’s most dedicated killers from Russia, Pakistan, ISIS, and even a corrupt U.S. billionaire. Not great if you want to stay alive.

While this book is clearly an action thriller, with deep roots in military-style combat, detailed weaponry descriptions, and sustained action scenes, the human story comes front and center even as the mayhem continues. Bishop is no superhero. His emotions are of a man who experiences sizeable loss and yet must keep his feelings bottled up as the beloved leader of his band of brothers. While he is wounded several times throughout the book, we feel his determination to continue doing his duty under the circumstances, few of us could sustain.

In other hands, a story of this complexity could have been cartoonish, a video game. But the book maintains a careful balance between the go-go action and the humanity of its characters.

Bishop’s Law is the second in a series on John Bishop. A third book is in development as of this writing. Readers may want to consider reading the first volume, Bishop’s War, before reading Bishop’s Law. While the book stands on its own, a richer reading experience might be had by reading the two books in sequence.

September 8, 2020
A NIGHT in BABYLON by Michael West – African American Urban Fiction, Fiction Urban Life, Action/Adventure Fiction

In a future Los Angeles, a terrorist group called the Stay Ready Soldiers (SRS) has declared war on seemingly everyone. The city is on the verge of martial law, with political and corporate corruption everywhere in a city all but collapsed. Anti-establishment groups roam L.A. with advanced weaponry virtually matching the powers of the federal government. People in endless numbers, both good guys and bad guys, are blown to bits throughout the novel with the blood and violence found in the most-venal video games. Yet, themes of systemic injustice come to bear in the experiences and emotions of the central cast of characters while facing daunting opposition to their cause.

In a country described by the media in the book as being on the verge of collapse, with issues including unemployment, crime, healthcare, education, immigration, and climate change quickly eroding, viewers are asked to decide whether the SRS is either a force of freedom fighters or domestic terrorists. Which are they? You get a chance to choose as the book opens with a bloody attack on a police unit by two SRS soldiers, Geronimo and Kali, who are as close as a love interest as any two people in the book.

The pair must keep their wits (and guns) about them to cross the dilapidated streets of a neglected stretch of L.A., meeting with allies in the fight for justice and change. They face hired killers and the U.S. government’s agents, as well as crises of faith and the threat of a conspiracy that could overturn their very mission.

A Night in Babylon is full of larger-than-life action scenes in which bullets fly, fires burn, and explosions rock the night. From the beginning of the book, this action sets up the stakes: the Stay Ready Soldiers’ lives hang in the balance of one night, as they hunt and are hunted. The narrative flows in and out, taking the reader smoothly from tense scenes to calm and emotionally intimate ones, and back to the action yet again. There’s time to breathe with this story, but the sense of danger is never far away. The action takes surprising turns within the various firefights, and though sometimes there isn’t enough time spent setting up details that become important later in the scene, the well-paced prose keeps the fights exciting.

The LAPD and U.S. federal agents are the distinct villains, painted as more than just cruel individuals but as part of a massive unjust system that shoves people of color down, especially in cities like Los Angeles. A Night in Babylon shows abuses of power like those that exist in the real world, and even though the action scenes are extravagant, the violence and injustice that drives the SRS are drawn from reality. The story critiques not only how authority reacts to resistance against violence with a heightening of violence, but also how authorities can exploit unstable times and places to expand their power and control over people.

Viewing this novel strictly as violence porn would be a mistake. Woven into it are dystopian themes that are now inescapably part of today’s America taken to extremes. At the same time, it does not shrink from asking questions about the nature of today’s violence. Embedded in the story are questions about the role of corporations in bed with the government. What do we really know, the book asks, about the intertwined interests of politicians and corporations? Questions like these used to be relegated to comic books and/or the Internet’s dark side. With credible news reports on similar issues in today’s headlines in newspapers and on T.V., it is undoubtedly fair games for novels such as this one to take these discussions into literature and let readers decide their relevance.

What is A Night in Babylon ultimately trying to say? Is it entertainment, a political tract, or a warning? The cynicism expressed in this relatively short novel is too blatant to ignore, but it does not seem to cut to the left or the right. In that sense, it is a Rorschach test for readers to determine its point of view. Whichever way readers respond, it’s a book that is hard to ignore.

August 10, 2020