Saint Monkey: A Novel

by Jacinda Townsend, Allyson Johnson (Read by)

Overview

A stunning debut novel of two girls raised in hardship, separated by fortune, and reunited through tragedy.

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she'll never get out of Kentucky—but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County.

That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem—an offer she can't resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city—young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach.

Jacinda Townsend's remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501215643
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Jacinda Townsend studied at Harvard University and Duke University Law School before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches creative writing at Indiana University. Saint Monkey is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

What to do with the teenage girl as subject? She has been much maligned in the pages of our literature—Shirley Jackson's homicidal Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or Jeffrey Eugenides's suiciding sisters. Even in less lethal incarnations, young girls in novels take advantage or are taken advantage of. The question of innocence is central…and virtue is prized above all else. Though it seems nearly impossible to escape some version of these conventions, Jacinda Townsend's compelling debut…sees its adolescent central characters through the broader lens of their friendship and the limitations of gender, race and age that inform the choices the girls make…Saint Monkey is certainly a coming-of-age novel—its teenage heroines eat the damning apple and fall from innocence. But it is agency that matters most for Caroline and Audrey. In Townsend's hands, virtue and innocence were only a veil that needed to fall away so the girls might see themselves, and their chosen course, more clearly.

The New York Times Book Review - Ayana Mathis

12/16/2013
Townsend’s debut novel chronicles the lives of two black girls growing up in the dusty Appalachian mountains of Kentucky in the era of segregation. As children, Audrey and Caroline are bound together by their unpopularity, and their friendship quickly deepens, as they buffer each other against the cruelties that their small world hurls at them. They share adolescent angst and their wild dreams for the future, but when Caroline’s father brutally murders her mother, Audrey and Caroline’s friendship is changed in ways neither girl fully understands. They grow apart during high school, colliding occasionally, but Caroline is busy with boys and Audrey recedes into a quiet life of reading and playing piano for her grandfather, later finding work as a jazz musician in Harlem. The freedom and energy of Harlem sing through Audrey as she trades her country sandals for stilettos and spends her evenings listening to legends like Thelonious Monk and Ethel Waters. Back home, Caroline struggles to take care of her ailing grandmother and bring some money into the house. There are some clumsy moments in the prose, but Townsend captures both the girls’ relationship and the desperation of the small, black community in Appalachia. (Feb)

Publishers Weekly

An absolute marvel of a book. Jacinda Townsend is dazzling as she transports the reader to a different time and place.

Roxane Gay

A novel of immense depth and tenderness. Townsend’s prose recalls the music of Toni Morrison, and Saint Monkey takes us on a soulful and deeply satisfying journey into the heart of Appalachia, and beyond.

Samrat Upadhyay

A breathtakingly insightful, suspenseful, and gorgeously realized novel of cruelty and sorrow, anger and forgiveness, improvisation and survival, and the transcendent beauty of nature and art.

Donna Seaman - Booklist (starred review)

Takes us backstage at the Apollo and into the smoky, late-night clubs where the art of jazz is fashioned before our eyes…The reader is buffeted by the transformative waves of race and music in America.

Jonathan Odell - Star Tribune

[A] novel to curl up with…Irresistible.

Philadelphia Tribune

Vivid.

Kasia Hopkins - News Gazette

Captures the imagination and the heart.

Jacinta Howard - Upscale Magazine

This is a breathtakingly insightful, suspenseful, and gorgeously realized novel of cruelty and sorrow, anger and forgiveness, improvisation and survival, and the transcendent beauty of nature and art.

Donna Seaman - Booklist

Impressive.

Carmela Ciuraru - New York Times

Saint Monkey is an absolute marvel of a book. Jacinda Townsend is dazzling as she transports the reader to a different time and place—the 1950s, rural Kentucky, and Harlem at the height of the jazz era. Two young girls, Audrey and Caroline, fight for a place in the world and, though their paths at times diverge, their journeys and this writer will utterly captivate you.

Roxanne Gay

This stunner of a novel—set in Kentucky just before Civil Rights blows Jim Crow to pieces—tracks the lives of two young black women, both outsiders, both searching, and the thorny friendship that holds them together.

Junot Díaz - The New Yorker

★ 01/01/2014
This remarkable debut immerses the reader in the lives of two African American teenagers growing up in small-town Kentucky in the late 1950s. Caroline and Audrey inhabit a borderland between the emancipated North and the segregated South at a time when the repressive Fifties are giving way to the more liberated Sixties. The two friends are tied together by loss: Audrey longingly remembers her father, an airman killed in the Korean War, and Caroline's mother is horrifically murdered. Caroline straddles the boundary between beautiful and homely and dreams of going to Hollywood, but it's Audrey, who inherited her father's musical talent and can play jazz piano by ear, who manages to escape to New York City. Discovered at 18 while performing at a funeral, she travels to Harlem, where she plays for a time in the Apollo Theater's house band. But both girls find it difficult to overcome racism and the family ties binding them to their hometown. VERDICT Townsend's descriptive prose, dense with imagery, portrays life in the Jim Crow South and Harlem's heyday with startling immediacy. This author is one to watch.—Reba Leiding, formerly with James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

2013-12-08
The friendship between two black teenage girls in Kentucky flags when one of them moves to Harlem in this low-energy first novel. In the 1950s, the small town of Mt. Sterling is strictly segregated. Audrey and Caroline are neighbors in the "colored" section. Audrey is only 11 when her beloved father, Lindell, enlists in the Air Force and dies his very first day in Korea (friendly fire). The shock drives her mother to drink; she works two jobs and is seldom home. Caroline's situation is far worse. For starters, she's plug ugly, inheriting unwelcome features from the white man who raped her grandmother. The horror comes when her mother disappears; she has been murdered and dismembered by her husband, known as Sonnyboy. He confesses but never explains why he killed his meek, faithful wife; Townsend's awkward handling of the episode is a tear in the fabric. Caroline refuses to speak to her father again (incredibly, he only does five years jail time) but moves right along: "Ain't like some big thing happened." She's first to snag a boyfriend, putting distance between the two friends. Audrey's ace in the hole is her skill as a pianist. Mr. Glaser, a talent scout from the world-famous Apollo, hears her playing at a funeral and insists she come to New York. This is Audrey's big moment--joining the Apollo house band at 17 and living in Harlem--but Townsend can't make it shine, even when the bassist, August, 11 years her senior, falls for her big time. There will be rough sledding ahead for the lovebirds and for the two childhood friends; it's Sonnyboy that has the smooth ride. Townsend has attempted a big-canvas novel, but it's only in the close-knit Mt. Sterling neighborhood that she seems at home.

Kirkus Reviews

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