Saint Monkey: A Novel
*Starred Review* Caroline and Audrey, best friends and competitors, live across the street from each other in the African American section of little Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, during the fiercely segregated 1950s. Caroline, called Pookie, dreams of Hollywood. Audrey, called Poindexter because of her thick glasses, is a musical prodigy. Both endure crushing family tragedies. A chance encounter sparks Audrey’s bold escape to Harlem, where, a penny-poor country gal in a thin cotton dress, she secures a gig with the house band in the famed Apollo Theater and finds love. While Audrey acclimates to speedy, sophisticated New York and the cut-throat music world, Caroline endures a scraping-by rural life, caring for her ailing grandmother and younger sister.  The women take turns narrating, and stellar first novelist Townsend renders their opposite lives with stunningly sensuous and revelatory detail. Her characters’ struggles form one long dance of need and denial, jealousy and longing that embodies the anguish of women’s lives compounded by brutal racial prejudice. As Townsend intimately and indelibly illuminates the psychological traumas of the times, she asks profoundly personal questions about staying and going, sacrifice and ambition. This is a breathtakingly insightful, suspenseful, and gorgeously realized novel of cruelty and sorrow, anger and forgiveness, improvisation and survival, and the transcendent beauty of nature and art. --Donna Seaman