MixedHouston ChronicleThough Abbott claimed she had a fun time researching this subject (she reportedly had 85,000 pages of notes when she was done), I was kind of put off by why this recorder of historical girl-power would devote more than 300 pages—dispensing scenes and situations as she usually does, with all the amusingly unsubtle, can-you-believe-this-honey raciness of a wine-guzzling, society gal dishing the latest dirt at a brunchy get-together—to such a sordid, unrepentant tale. It wasn’t until I got to the bat-guano-crazy last half, where the former attorney ends up representing himself in a circus of a murder trial, that I got the sense that this is Abbott spinning a tale that both displays her knack for chronicling fact-based, throwback tawdriness and gives our true-crime-obsessed culture something it can snack on ... The fanciful Ghosts may not be as completely morbid and grimy as some of your more down-and-dirty, criminal accounts, but it’s still filled with money, power, greed, murder, women you shouldn’t trust and the men who foolishly do anyway. Basically, it’s a story as American as apple pie.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
RaveThe Houston ChronicleWith Dancer, it seems he wants to continue in the tradition Morrison famously established in Beloved -- telling harrowing, eloquent tales of 19th-century slave life, garnished with a hopeful serving of magical realism ... Coates documents the horrors African-Americans went through during slavery in a blunt yet evocative manner. Instead of dramatizing the violent, degrading, family-destroying instances that were brought on by slavery, he appears more concerned with how slaves like Hiram would’ve continued to handle the psychological pain and scarring that came with it ... By melding disturbing fact with dramatic fiction, Coates uses his first novel to remind readers that we need to be acknowledged as the men and women who were literally on the ground, destroying our bodies as we worked to make this land look like a real country.
