Half-Blood Blues (Edugyan) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The novel is narrated by…Sid Griffiths, who…speaks with a black Baltimorean accent, punctuated with a hint of German slang, and even if his voice sounds a little off…it doesn't get in the way of Edugyan's nimble storytelling. She tempers the plot's Casablanca-style melodrama…with healthy doses of quotidian banter, admirably capturing the bickering camaraderie of the young musicians.
Andrew Haig Martin - New York Times Book Review


Unforgettable…Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed. It’s a work that promises to lead black literature in a whole new direction.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)


Destined to win a wide audience… Deftly paced in incident and tone, moving from scenes of snappy dialogue, in which band members squabble and banter humorously, to tense, atmospheric passages of description…Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly-imagined story.… Half-Blood Blues itself represent a kind of flowering—that of a gifted storyteller
Toronto Star


A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal… [A] brilliantly fast-moving novel.
Times (London)


Shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism…Truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang.
Independent (London)


(Starred review.) Edugyan’s second novel, shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, pays a mournful tribute to the Hot-Time Swingers, a once-legendary six-piece German-American multiracial jazz ensemble gigging in Berlin on the eve of WWII. When the pianist is picked up by the Gestapo, the remaining members flee to Paris with forged passports to meet Louis Armstrong in hopes of cutting a record. After the German occupation of Paris, “the Boots” arrest Hieronymous (“Hiero”) Falk, the band’s 20-year-old-genius Afro-German trumpet player, leaving the band with one half-finished record, one shattered love affair, and one too many secrets. The story of the band’s demise and partial resurrection, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths—the upright bass player—unfolds in richly scripted vignettes alternating between 1939/1940 (when Hiero disappears) and 1992 (when Sid and Chip Jones, the percussionist, revisit Berlin for a Hieronymous Falk festival and walk down memory lane). By the book’s end, readers will have pieced together most of the truth behind Sid’s biased recounting of events, but nothing will prepare them for the disclosure of an ultimate betrayal. While the rarely explored subject adds to the book’s allure, what stands out most is its cadenced narration and slangy dialogue, as conversations, both spoken and unspoken, snap, sizzle, and slide off the page. Sid’s motivation can feel obscure, but his lessons learned are hard-won all the same.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Canadian Edugyan’s second novel jumps between Berlin and Paris in 1939–40 and Berlin in 1992 to tell the story of a German American jazz band and its star trumpeter, Hieronymous Falk.... That narrow moment in time when the freewheeling decadence of Weimar Germany gave way to jackbooted tyranny has been the subject of much fine fiction, but Edugyan is the first to overlay it with jazz history. It makes a sublime marriage. —Bill Ott
Booklist


In Edugyan's second novel...some jazz musicians find their music and lives endangered in Nazi Germany and occupied Paris. Paris 1940. Nazis everywhere. The musicians are huddled in a shabby apartment. One of them, without papers, goes out on a reckless search for milk. Bam! He's arrested and deported to a German camp. Edugyan (a Canadian of Ghanaian descent) has incorporated the novel's climax in this taut opening.... A memorable evocation of the defiant thrill of jazz at a terrible time.
Kirkus Reviews