Selected as WLRN's Sundial's January 2019 Book Club Pick
Allen has created a consummate tragicomedy of African American family
secrets and sorrows, and of faith under duress and wide open to
interpretation. Perfect timing and crackling dialogue, as well as
heartrending pain balanced by uproarious predicaments, make for a
shout-hallelujah tale of transgression and grace, a gospel of lusty and
everlasting love.
--Booklist
Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu--the
chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries,
their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a
dispassionate chronicler of the addict's daily ritual, neither
glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand.
--The New York Times Book Review, on All or Nothing
Into an austere community of Christian believers at the Church of Our
Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters come the star-crossed
African American Romeo and Juliet. In the world of Jesus Boy, Romeo is
sixteen-year-old Elwyn Parker, a devout and sincere piano prodigy who
learns too late that the saintly girl he has had a crush on all his life
is inexplicably pregnant and soon to be wed. Juliet is the beautiful
widow, Sister Morrisohn, age forty-two, who, in the pain and confused
emotions of her grieving, ends up in Elwyn's arms.
Despite the problems posed by their age difference and the strict
prohibitions of their strong religious beliefs, Elwyn and Sister
Morrisohn's love is true, and as it grows among the ascetics,
abstainers, and holy ghost rollers of their church, it exposes with wit,
poignancy, and insight the dark secrets and ancient crimes of the pious.
In Jesus Boy, Elwyn learns through tragedy and epiphany that the holy
are no different from the rest of us.
