The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel [Hardcover]

Cynthia Shearer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2004

The Celestial Jukebox is set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar. Shearer’s rural south is dependent on the rather less attractive fruits of capitalism, including agribusiness, gambling, and the dwindling vices surrounding the retail trades. The mood feels like a very humid melancholy. And into this weather comes Boubacar, a 15-year-old boy from Africa joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area—new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a small town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, straggling members of the original white families of the area, and unsorted other imports. Boubacar visits The Celestial Grocery, the virtual city center presided over by a cranky second-generation Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox that often hoards its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson, when stuck on the same sad Louvin Brothers song. The tie that binds all these lives is American popular music, its origins and power. The purity and beauty of the writing—like the purity of the imagined soundtrack of more than 30 songs that exists within this story—marks The Celestial Jukebox as a rare book, filled with music, struggle, and spontaneous joy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A crotchety old Chinese-American man sweeps up brilliant pink blossoms as cats weave about his skinny legs, and dreams of a dance with a Honduran lady in white keds; a middle-aged farmer fights the onslaught of what passes for progress and examines what may be the end of his marriage; a young woman of color examines her past and seeks to capture the sad music of the Delta on film; a young Mauritanian man, freely come to Mississippi from Africa, finds both wonder and confusion in this loud, bright new land, as he longs after an old steel guitar in a pawn-shop window and falls further in love with the blues of the American kaffir. A no-longer-so-young mother fights her sense of invisibility in her family's life and is suddenly visible to someone forbidden. The damaged, fey Bebe Marie crafts her birdhouses of bottlecaps and fills her crumbling walls with images and poetry: "This is the orchard of abandoned dreams." Weaving it all together is music: the blues, jazz, the river of sound and emotion whose current flows worldwide, with unexpected effect. Shearer (The Wonder Book of the Air) has crafted a lyrical, floating world of an imagined Delta town that could not and does not exist, but perhaps should. Her touching characters and the beauty of her language overshadow any issue of pacing or self-conscious preciousness that threaten it, often rising to the level of prose poetry. A must for readers of modern serious fiction; a joy to the ear; a return to beauty in literature; it needs only a true spiritual dimension to achieve greatness.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Sooner or later everyone around Madagascar, Mississippi, comes to the Celestial Grocery, run by Angus Chien, a second-generation Chinese man. The centerpiece of the grocery is the jukebox, never updated or repaired since its installation in 1938. Angus keeps coins on top of the machine to use, because you can press the button but you don't always get what you ask for. The various characters, whose stories eventually include a trip to the grocery, are used to disappointments. Boubacar, "fresh off the boat" from Mauritania, learns that America means "being enriched and robbed at the same time." Raine learns that the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood is not always so perfect. And Angus learns that there is more than one way to break a heart. The thread that holds all these people together is the music of Slim Harpo, Son House, Sol Hoopii, and Bob Dylan. Shearer (The Wonder Book of Air, 1997) has created nothing less than a gem in this tale of intertwining destinies. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 396 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (November 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593760523
• ISBN-13: 978-1593760526
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,195,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Reminder of the Rural South, January 16, 2005

By 

Jamie C. Robertson "southern lit review" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Celestial Jukebox, Cynthia Shearer's second novel, is a journey into the fictitious town of Madagascar, Mississippi. The words Shearer chooses to tell this story are as heavy and slow to the tongue as the weight of the townspeople's daily rituals and the memory of their many disappointments. Shearer, of course, does this to bring about an authenticity that might not otherwise be so well conveyed. Like its people, Madagascar falls short of the glory of independence, and relies on the vices of others for survival-with one bright exception. In the corner of a grey, little store called the Celestial Grocery sits the Celestial Jukebox-a place where people have brought their sorrows, heartaches as well as their joys and triumphs since 1938.

Boubacar, an unlikely resident of Madagascar, is a 15 year old boy from Mauritania who visits the Celestial Grocery, and meets the grocery store's owner, Angus Chien, a cantankerous old man with a southern accent that seems mismatched with his oriental skintone and slanted eyes. He is the second generation of his Chinese family and the South is all he knows. Angus offers Boubacar a job and Boubacar quickly discovers the Celestial Jukebox. Never updated and never repaired, the Jukebox plays the heavenly classics from Sam Cooke, Slim Harpo and Bob Dylan to name a few and if you want to hear them, well, Mr. Chien keeps coins on top of the Jukebox so you can. It's one of those kind, little gestures he makes that lets us know he isn't always so crabby.

Shearer takes her time introducing us to the characters that make up Madagascar. Dean Fondren a man who knows where he is going to die, and his wife Alexis who doesn't think she wants to know such things. Raine is a middle-aged woman who can't help but reminisce when she hears Bob Dylan. She struggles to find that beautiful woman she used to was before she was a mother and wife-when she was somebody.

The tone throughout is thick with rich desperation, slow climbs to celestial moments and superb description. At times I wanted it to move along a bit faster, but looking back, I'm glad Shearer stayed true to the pace that matches the pace of rural Mississippi. She brilliantly puts you smack dab in the heart of Mississippi on typical summer's evening. You might even want a cool wet rag around your neck to stave off the humidity as you read, and you share what the townspeople of Madagascar share-life in the South and The Celestial Jukebox.


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5.0 out of 5 stars genius, February 27, 2010

By 

S. Lee "Shannon" (Birmingham, AL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Celestial Jukebox (Paperback)

Thomas Wolfe, when asked about his writing talent, said he knew he was great; "I know it too well to blush behind it," he said. Cynthia Shearer must fall into this category, for she has penned one of the greatest novels of the underclass and alien experience I've ever read. With colorful characters like a cross between Carson McCullers and John Irving, she spins a web of beauty that you can't help but fall into.
This atmospheric, tin-flashy novel of coastal Mississippi is spellbinding and unforgettable.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LITERARY BUT WITH COMMERCIAL APPEAL, February 23, 2005

By 

Janice Daugharty (South Georgia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Celestial Jukebox: A Novel (Hardcover)

THE CELESTIAL JUKEBOX is so rich and compelling, my only complaint is that I couldn't resist reading and make it last longer. I'll be hard-put to find a next novel of equal merit. Cynthia Shearer's writing is fresh and exact--never a cliche.

The best books, it's been said, are the ones you can't figure how they were written. I don't know how Shearer did this!

Author, Janice Daugharty