Deacon King Kong by James McBride
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I suppose I must be pretty late to the party having just discovered James McBride, since there is a long list of his previous heralded novels on the first page. I read this book because it was number 2 on the NY Times 'best books of 2020' list. Number one, which I read first, was quite a disappointment (see my last review), but I'm glad i persevered! This book is wonderfully written and a real pleasure to read. I finished it in a couple days. The prose is a bit like the old potboiler dick tracy gumshoe writing style, and the story is packed with wonderfully rich characters. It is a bit of over the top with the racialization - all the characters are initially and primarily characterized as being 'irish' or 'brown' (including southerners) or 'eye-talian', followed with some pretty trite prejudicial sounding description of this characterization. I guess this was pretty standard though, in the 1960's, in NY, when the story takes place.

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