RaveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneThe stories in James McBride’s latest book, Five-Carat Soul, often feel like parables ... McBride’s storytelling gifts, showcased in his National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird, are on full display in Five-Carat Soul. The characters are disparate, but McBride is such an agile writer that each voice feels authentic and somehow familiar. Taken together the stories speak, if not directly to one another, to a greater humanity and wisdom we all desire. Each story gently or subversively leads to a revelation that you turn over and over. They feel like fables even when the characters are dealing with the ugliest bits of reality ... In his author’s note, McBride says the stories have come to him over the course of nearly 35 years. They feel like kinfolk, if not the direct progeny, of his other novels and even nonfiction work ... Yet the work is not derivative. It crackles with the bright energy of an author who — when he’s not writing prose — is an accomplished jazz musician. It’s there in the way the teens of Uniontown rib each other, never missing a conversational beat. It’s present in the way the animals riff when they talk to each other through their cages. These are stories of and from the soul.
