From Publishers Weekly
African-Canadian poet Clarke returns to the subject he treated previously in verse (Execution Poems) in this lyrical, original debut novel: the true story of the 1949 murder of a taxi driver in New Brunswick, Canada, by Clarke's first cousins, brothers George and Rufus Hamilton. The author and his characters are descended from African-Americans who immigrated to Nova Scotia at the end of the Revolutionary War, and he spins his tale in "Blackened English." The result is sparkling, powerfully inventive prose. Clarke begins the brothers' story with their impoverished, part black, part Mi'kmaq Indian parents, Asa (a violent "patriarch who felt commissioned to destroy his family") and the beautiful, tawny-skinned Cynthy. For George and Rufus ("just two black boys blackened further by Depression"), this lineage dooms them from birth, if not their very conceptions in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia. George is the simpler brother, willing to make an honest living, while Rufus, the younger brother but the leader, is brighter, more creative and ruthless—he only wants "to plot piano gigs and casual thefts." Petty crime escalates to murder in a desperate hope for cash, and Clarke eloquently plots the Hamiltons' tragic trajectory toward the crime for which they hang.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
The Canadian province of Nova Scotia, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, represents an unfamiliar setting for American readers; adding to the unfamiliarity will be the specific milieu first-novelist Clarke writes about: the community of black Nova Scotians, descendants of blacks emigrating northward from the U.S. in the late--eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The author's involvement with the major characters in his novel is more than what is usual between creator and creations; brothers George and Rufus Hamilton, the protagonists here, were executed for a 1949 murder and were Clarke's first cousins. His fictionalized biography of the two men, presented in a syncopated, punchy, metaphoric voice, locates within their abusive upbringing and their drifting kind of adult lives the provenance of their inclination toward thievery and violence and, eventually, their capacity for committing the crime for which they pay the ultimate price. With some episodes too drawn out and others too telescopic--not an unusual problem with first novels----this is nevertheless a mesmerizing tale. Other novels that explore the bubbling up of violence from within one's psyche are cited in the adjacent Read-alikes column. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
