Blue

A highly cinemagraphic, compulsively readable third novel by a wonderful young talent. Rickshaw Jones is a brash young blues artist definitely on the way up, when suddenly her life is turned upside down by the senseless death of her twin sister, Israellen. Beset with doubt and grief, she recalls their lives growing up in Minneapolis, their rites of passage. With insight from her inter-racial heritage, Ricki confronts the stereotypes that trouble America, and faces at the same time the identity formed by her music, and her love of women. Her mother, Liberty Jones, is Ricki’s touchstone out of the past – a woman who strove to give her daughters the one thing each would later need. But others also are crucial to their nurturing: Terry Cee and Siobhan, Mamie, Cherise, Emma. As the memories of Ricki and Liberty and Israellen are entered, their experiences resonate with the blues of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and Motown, ringing with anger and sadness and rare triumph. Through these stories of women in underclass America, stretched from the beginning of the civil rights movement well into the 1980s, Blue weaves strands of memory into a tapestry which depicts, finally, possibility of reconciliation.