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    Jazz Moon: A Novel
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    Jazz Moon: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Jazz Moon: A Novel
    Ebook422 pages6 hours

    Jazz Moon: A Novel

    By Joe Okonkwo

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 13, 2016
    ISBN9781496701176

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    Reviews for Jazz Moon

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I found this book for a couple of dollars at my local Goodwill, and it had an interesting premise, so I didn’t think I could really lose much by picking it up. It is thicker than it looks; I wouldn’t say it’s particularly expansive, but it is an easy read regardless of how large it appears to be. I got through it in less than a week (my typical read is about one book every week or two), and I enjoyed the book from beginning to end.SOME (BUT NOT MAJOR) SPOILERSThe main character is Ben Charles, a man who starts off living in the Harlem Jazz Age, and eventually moves to Paris. He’s a hard worker who enjoys writing poetry in his spare time, devoted to his best friend and wife... At least in the beginning. But then he starts to experience a sexual reawakening. He’s always been into men, but he’s squashed his feelings down, leaving a hollowness inside that is suddenly filled and ignited when he meets hot-headed, charismatic trumpet player Baby Back Johnston.Let’s just say that Ben’s carefully coordinated life sort of spirals away from him, and because of the actions that occur through several years, he finds himself again in Paris. Ben is not a likable character, in my opinion, which I really dig. He’s not a typical hero, but rather a complex, tortured individual who struggles with his own sexually, his place in the world as an African American, and his duty to his former wife and societies’ view on his sexuality and his identity. He indulges in debauchery, hurts people, and is in turn hurt by people as well. But in the end, he finds who he was always meant to be and he finds a semblance of peace.END SPOILERSTHE VERDICT:I liked the book overall, and I even learned things in the process. As I get older and read more books, I find that the books I enjoy the most teach me something, or show me a different perspective on life that I find inspiring or just different and weird. I had no idea that African Americans were fetishized so much in Paris, for example. You were in with the in crowd as long as you could amuse them, and when you were out, they were pretty ambivalent about your life or wellbeing. Well-written, easy read with interesting cultural tidbits, all wrapped up in a heady, intriguing jazz-infused bundle.