(no subject)

[skygiants]

I was talking tonight with varadia about Daniel José Older's Half-Resurrection Blues, which reminded me that I've been meaning to write it up.

Half-Resurrection Blues is a well-done, clever, diverse but extremely dudely urban fantasy noir about a secret organization of ghostly agents who police undead happenings in New York City. The protagonist, Carlos Delacruz, stands out from his ghostly colleagues by being a semi-hemi-demi-zombie with a mysterious past he doesn't remember; he is also blessed with the kind of single-target heterosexual male gaze and poor decision-making re: attractive women that ... is probably quite realistic but is usually quite frustrating for me to read about nonetheless.

So as a book it probably would have hit squarely to the left of my personal interests -- except for the crucial detail that Half-Resurrection Blues takes place not just in New York City, but in Brooklyn, and not just in Brooklyn, but in Crown Heights. Daniel José Older does a frankly astounding job setting a sense of place; even if I didn't know the neighborhood, I would have been impressed with the setting and detail work. But in fact I have spent more of my adult living there than anywhere else to date, which meant that any frustrations that I encountered while reading were pretty much completely drowned out by an overwhelming sense of recognition and groundedness. I could basically walk the entire plot of this book. It's AMAZING.

Crown Heights Is Magnificent, as the now-tragically-deceased mural used to say, and so is Daniel José Older's ability to evoke it; I will absolutely read any of his other Brooklyn books.

Comments

[musesfool]

extremely dudely urban fantasy noir

Seriously. I hoped for more interesting things with Sasha, though what I guess I really wanted was for Kia and Dr. Tijou to have more to do.

I'm not particularly familiar with Crown Heights, but it did feel really New York to me.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I really wanted ... well, the sad thing is that I don't really know much about what I felt about Sasha herself, because it was drowned out by the screaming chorus of 'NO STOP THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA' whenever Carlos started hitting on Sasha. NO. STOP. TERRIBLE IDEA.

Kia and Dr. Tijou were both great though! Would so happily have read a book just about either of them, honestly.

[oracne]

I enjoyed the heck out of this book.

[skygiants]

OF COURSE someone wants to open up a portal to the underworld in Grand Army Plaza! It is the perfect location.

[ceitfianna]

I enjoyed this book but yeah, it was far too dudely for me too. I think I would have liked it better if someone else was the main character.

[skygiants]

Kia! A book about Kia manning a corner deli in Brooklyn and dealing with all the weird supernatural crap that comes through it, what an awesome book that would be.

[stultiloquentia]

I haven't read any of his yet, though he's on my list. I had that suspicion about HRB, so I was thinking of starting with Shadowshaper, which has a female lead. Have you read it?

[skygiants]

I haven't yet, but it's on my list! At the time I put Half-Resurrection Blues on reserve at the library they did not have Shadowshaper yet, or I would probably have read that first.