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In electrifying prose and with a rare generosity of feeling, this
dramatic and piercing debut novel tells the story of the fractured
lives of three generations of one Southern family. "Magnificent . .
. brims with characters who seem truer than life."--Kaye Gibbons.
Set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar, Cynthia
Shearer's ""The Celestial Jukebox"" depicts a rural South dependent
on agribusiness and the fruits of some less attractive forms of
capitalism - gambling and other vices. Into this world comes
Boubacar, a fifteen-year-old African boy joining friends from
Mauritania already living in the area. They are new African blacks
not especially noteworthy in a town filled with Chinese emigrants,
African Americans within memory of slavery, and straggling members
of the original white families of the area. Presiding over
Madagascar is Angus, the second-generation Delta Chinese proprietor
of the Celestial Grocery, and his vintage jukebox with its treasure
of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson songs. The ties that
bind the lives in this community together are American roots music
and the desire to make a home in the rural South. The purity and
beauty of Cynthia Shearer's writing - like the purity of music that
exists within this story, an imagined soundtrack of more than
thirty songs - marks ""The Celestial Jukebox"" as that most rare
book, a novel as historically expansive as it is intimate, filled
with music, wisdom, and spontaneous joy.
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