An ensemble-cast novel about the perennial temptations of dangerous love, following a jazz musician and the multiple women-some charmed by him, others scorned, who find the power of their own voices.
Moody and musical ... Warrell excels at describing these points of contact — more often bruising impact than connection — conveying the varying degrees of longing, loneliness, and even aversion that can bring two people together ... She’s also skilled at describing jazz — and, perhaps more important, what the music means to a musician ... Despite this sensitive portrayal, the book does have occasional off notes ... The specificity — the ripped-from-the-headlines quality — feels jarring, at least to this Boston-area reader ... Warrell does much better when she sticks to the timeless dance we humans do: between love and fear, the need to embrace and the search for self. For Circus, Koko, and the score of others in this sprawling and ambitious book, it’s an improvisation, and at its best, it’s beautiful.
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is jazz masquerading as a novel. Some will love it while others (people who like unfussy sentences or pop music, say) will grow irritated within the first few pages. The style has an almost lulling effect, as though one were lilting gently on the swell of each paragraph. In some hands this would be grating but, luckily, Warrell pulls it off ... Although this comes dangerously close to feeling overwritten... on the whole the effect is sensuously pleasurable ... Warrell’s portrayal of Koko’s adolescent sexuality is beautifully done (Warrell is brilliant at writing female desire – rarely have I read the physical sensations of sex transmuted into language so deftly), and her experience of being mixed-race is also movingly depicted.
... patchy but soulful ... Structured like a jam session, the novel favors a series of riffs over any one melodic theme. Warrell gives a supporting cast of women their own solos, through close-third-person chapters that detail their entanglements with the elusive Circus ... the reader longs for actual scenes showing who they were together, showing Circus’s capacity for love to counterbalance his fetish for leaving. Without that, his protestations feel thin...Other threads are left tantalizingly loose too...Warrell outlines fascinating satellite characters who beg to be filled in ... certain passages as elegant, unexpected and wrenching as the 'fierce' sounds that emerge from Circus’s trumpet.
