Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Laura Warrell Klappentext GMA BUZZ PICK • How do we find belonging when love is unrequited? A "gorgeously written debut" (Celeste Ng, best-selling author of Little Fires Everywhere ) filled with jazz and soul, about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, told by the women who love Circus Palmer—trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man—as they ultimately discover the power of their own voices. “Elegant, unexpected and…unforgettable.” — New York Times Book Review   “A modern masterpiece.” —Jason Reynolds, best-selling author of Look Both Ways      It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a forty-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him. Instead of facing the necessary conversation, Circus flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus. Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation. Leseprobe INTRO * Circus The girl may have been the end for him. The end’s beginning, like the bend of a road too slight to notice where it leads. She could have happened to him a day later or a day before, but she was there on that day, in that moment, just hours after Circus Palmer turned forty, a predictable time for a certain kind of end to come, and just seconds after Maggie slid her hand from his wrist and with her lips parted just enough to slip his finger through if he’d wanted, whispered, “I have something to tell you.”   Outstretched on a chaise longue beside the hotel pool, Cir­cus watched from a distance as the girl—in her mid-twenties, he figured—did cartwheels alone on the beach, her linen skirt falling open to bare the smooth plane of her hips and the slide of her calves sloping up to her toes. She lured his eyes away from Maggie, who was lying in another chaise longue beside him. All afternoon Maggie had been acting strangely, staring at nothing and losing the thread of conversations. This wasn’t Maggie. Cir­cus figured whatever it was she had to say wasn’t anything he wanted to hear, so he let his attention be taken by the girl doing flips back and forth across the sand. When she landed on her feet, her hair lashed across her back like a whip, her shoulders lifted and hands spread beneath the melon sunset as if she carried it on her fingertips. Hips, calves, toes, shoulders, hands, she circled in the air again.   “I wasn’t going to say anything.” Maggie hummed, the sound not fully making its way to him, not quite breaking through his focus. “But I thought you should know.”   If she were any other woman, he would have told her to come to the point. But this was Maggie, so he waited, a sense of dread needling in his gut. Chewing at the inside of his cheek—always his mouth needed something to do—he concentrated on the melody the girl made inside his head as he tapped a nervous rhythm on his knee.   “Listen to what I’m telling you.” The push in Maggie’s voice, major-keyed and salty, brought Circus back to the cabana, back to the Wild Turkey warm in his glass and Maggie beside him. Her lips were pursed as she stroked her long neck and watched the night begin to fall, possibly without noticing the girl, possibly trying not to.   Six days earlier, after not seeing each other for weeks, they’d arrived in Miami and hastily made t...

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Beautifully and cleverly written, Laura Warrell s Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a stunner. The novel s tender, sensual, enchanting prose entices you into a world of deep longing and so much heartache. Still, I didn t want to leave it. A truly mesmerizing debut! Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
  
The most memorable novels of my life are boiling over with insatiably written secondary characters that crave their own books. The same can be said about our most jamming jazz quartets. This peculiar cacophony is exactly what we see in at least five characters in Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Koko, for example, is a once in lifetime, once in a galaxy character. Laura Warrell has crafted a world within the world with the achy mystery, wonder and subtexual bounce of the greatest jazz. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a soulful, fleshy and absolutely stunning debut. Warrell will re-teach us how to wail, pause and reckon. I am thankful.   Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
  
In an exceptional debut, Warrell turns love, or at least the love life of musician Circus Palmer into the proverbial jazz club: dark and sexy, freeing and frightening, ecstatic and lonely. This story is an example of how love, in all of its polyrhythms, can sometimes sound like song, and other times like noise. And this book is an example of how a great story can become a bass drum, kicking and thumping in your belly far after it s over. A modern masterpiece. Jason Reynolds, author of Look Both Ways

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a sultry and subversive debut. Laura Warrell s prose sparkles, but it s what she s got to say about sex and love and being a woman that will take your breath away. This book is a love song, and Warrell knows how to hold all the right notes.   Rachel Beanland, author of Florence Adler Swims Forever
  
Lyrical, sweeping, and life affirming, Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is an astonishing debut that wraps you in the passionate pulse of its characters and their world, and doesn't let go until its pitch perfect final note.   Liska Jacobs, author of Catalina and The Pink Hotel
 
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm kept me turning the pages to see what shenanigans the titular jazz musician pulled next, while also waiting to cheer the moment when the women in his life finally blocked his number. Laura Warrell has cooked up one of the most compelling, entertaining, and heartfelt reads in recent memory. Chris Terry, author of Black Card
 
In Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, we meet trumpet player Circus Palmer, as problematic as he is enigmatic, as irresistible as your favorite song, and the women whom he seeks out, and walks away from, are just as compelling. Laura Warrell writes with such assurance and grace her sentences sing and she has created a world I didn t want to leave: it s sexy and profound, painful and joyful. A remarkable, unforgettable debut. Edan Lepucki, author of California and Woman No. 17
 
A book about desire and about love, about where these emotions meet and part and sometimes interlace in inescapable ways. But it is about so much more: these characters, for instance, painted by Warrell s uniquely masterful brush so that even in small moments they seem entirely whole, entirely alive. Sentence by sentence, this is a novel showing its author at the top of her game a classic in the making. Brian Castleberry, author of Nine Shiny Objects

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm, proclaimed Jelly Roll Morton, and Warrell plays her exceptional first novel with plenty of rhythm and tenderness, delivered in brisk, mordantly gorgeous language that has its own natural flow. Each woman has her own life, her own story . . . and as in any good jazz piece these stories play off one another seamlessly. A highly recommended story of love and life that makes beautiful music. Library Journal (starred review)

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: LAURA WARRELL
• Editore: Pantheon Schocken Books
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 27.09.2022
• EAN: 9780375715396
• ISBN: 978-0-375-71539-6
• Pagine: 368
• Dimensioni: 156 mm x 234 mm x 25 mm
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi