Five-Carat Soul

Starred review from July 24, 2017
Humming with invention and energy, the stories collected in McBride’s first fiction book since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird again affirm his storytelling gifts. In the opening story, “The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set,” vintage toy dealer Leo Banskoff gets a lead on a priceless collectible: the long-lost train set made for Robert E. Lee’s son Graham by one of Smith & Wesson’s founders. In one of several surprises that upend his assumptions about value, Banskoff prepares for fierce negotiation but finds that the train’s impoverished, devoutly evangelical owner wants to give it away. In “The Fish Man Angel,” a weary President Lincoln makes a late-night visit to his dead son Willie’s horse, weeping alone before overhearing words that change history. In “The Christmas Dance,” a Ph.D. candidate begs two of the only surviving members of the African-American Ninety-Second Infantry Division to describe its role in a senselessly bloody World War II encounter; though their reluctance jeopardizes his thesis, ultimately the men—unlike the government they served—honor even unspoken promises. One of two groups of linked stories reimagines the animal world, while the other visits a gritty neighborhood of Uniontown, Penn., during the Vietnam War as teenagers grapple with limitation and longing. McBride adopts a variety of dictions without losing his own distinctively supple, musical voice; as identities shift, “truths” are challenged, and justice is done or, more often, subverted.

Starred review from July 1, 2017
McBride's (Kill 'em and Leave, 2016) short stories joyfully abound with indelible characters whose personal philosophies are far wiser than their circumstances allow, including the teenage members of the inner-city Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone BandBuck Boy, Ray-Ray, Blub, and Goat. Then there's the lion, jaguar, and whale in Mr. P & the Wind. A fierce loyalty forged on an Italian battlefield during WWII unites Carlos, Lillian, and the Judge in a Harlem ballroom in The Christmas Dance, while a black Civil War orphan, Abraham Henry Lincoln, believes he will finally meet his father when President Lincoln visits the troops in Richmond. A priceless toy train once belonging to Robert E. Lee brings a vintage toy dealer much wealth but little joy in The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set. Whatever the situation, McBride's protagonists encounter life's foolishness and futility courtesy of their outlier status, yet their compassion and wisdom put them at the heart of the most salient and critical junctures confronting humanity. McBride brings the snappy satire that endeared him to fans of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird (2013) and the courage and pathos that shone in The Miracle at St. Anna (2002) to this stellar collection of short fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2017

Author of the revelatory memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother and the National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird, McBride now gives us not one but many jewels: a collection of previously unpublished stories. McBride's first fiction since Bird and his first story collection, too; don't miss.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 22, 2018
Four talented actors bring to life the zany characters in the excellent audio edition of McBride’s story collection. In “The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set,” Arthur Morey conveys the apoplectic confusion of an antique toy salesman when a poor black preacher offers to gift him a train set—believed to have belonged to Robert E. Lee—that he knows is worth millions. In “The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band,” Nile Bullock perfectly captures the rhythmic speech of Butter, one of a group of teenaged boys whose band practices above a Chinese restaurant in a predominantly African-American town called The Bottom. Prentice Onayemi is equally masterly in the other stories about young men stuck at the bottom of society. Veteran voice actor Dominic Hoffman gives a consummate performance as the zoo animals who communicate telepathically with each other and with humans in the wonderful, whimsical, and surprising “Mr. P and the Wind.” This is one of the best audiobooks of 2017. A Riverhead hardcover.

Starred review from July 15, 2017
A versatile, illustrious author brings out his first short-fiction buffet for sampling, and the results are provocatively varied in taste and texture; sometimes piquant, other times zesty.It's not every contemporary fiction collection that includes one story featuring Abraham Lincoln and another (somewhat) unrelated story involving a young mixed-race orphan wandering Civil War battlefields insisting he is President Lincoln's son. But when the imagination at work here is as well-traveled as McBride's, such juxtapositions are easily understood--and widely anticipated. Celebrated for his bestselling family memoir, The Color of Water (1996), and his National Book Award-winning antebellum picaresque novel, The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride exhibits his formidable storytelling chops in an array of voices and settings that, however eclectic, are mostly held together by themes of race history and cultural collisions. As with most story collections, some selections work better than others; but those that do resonate profoundly. For instance: the first story, "The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set," is told from the point of view of a white antique-toy dealer who, upon encountering the black family who now own a rare 19th-century train set once given as a present to Robert E. Lee's son, is nonplused by their willingness to give him the valuable artifact without haggling over money. There is also a poignant four-story cycle bearing the rubric "The Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band," referring to a quintet of teen funk band musicians from an at-risk neighborhood in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb. McBride is daring enough to apply his realist's sensibilities to fantasy with "The Moaning Bench," in which a flamboyant heavyweight boxer bearing the looks, sass, and swagger, if not the same name, as Muhammad Ali challenges hell's satanic gatekeeper to fight for the souls of five quivering candidates for Eternal Damnation. The best is saved for last: "Mr. P & the Wind," a five-part suite of stories set in a contemporary urban zoo whose menagerie communicates with each other--and at least one human--in what they call Thought Speak. The charm emitted by these whimsical-yet-acerbic tales seems to come from a hypothetical late-19th-century collaboration of Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. McBride emerges here as a master of what some might call "wisdom fiction," common to both The Twilight Zone and Bernard Malamud, offering instruction and moral edification to his readers without providing an Aesop-like moral.

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