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Sep. 29th, 2015 11:22 pmI was talking tonight with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
