RaveThe Nashville SceneThis novel is also Randall’s articulate and soul-elevating witness, a song of gratitude to the man whose \'citizenship school\' gave her the tools to channel her own suffering into the radical joy of writing. And in an inspired creative twist, Randall writes a proxy of herself into the narrative: \'Colored Girl\' (C.G.), a former Ziggy protégée whose aloof and abusive mother spirited her away to D.C. as a child, has been entrusted with the task of finishing his manuscript. C.G.’s biography seeps into Ziggy’s saints’ book in the form of a parallel third-person narrative — set apart in italics as a prelude to each saint’s chapter — chronicling her coming of age and her discovery and curation of this nearly lost fictional manuscript. It’s an initially confusing device that unfolds slowly to reveal a deeper layer of story ... This feels, to me, like the book Randall’s whole life has prepared her to write, her own origin story folded into an elegiac, literary time capsule of the Detroit That Was — a cultural artifact that might one day serve as a blueprint for that lost world’s reinvention.
