OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile
Narrators Prentice Onayemi and Imani Parks swap chapters in this chronicle of Detroit in the years 1938-1968, when Black workers streamed into the city looking for work in the car plants. Onayemi creates the voice of Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, nightclub emcee at The Flame and The Driftwood Lodge and gossip columnist covering the celebrated Detroit neighborhood of Black Bottom. Parks employs a distant observational tone as she anchors the emotional side of the story. Motor City comes to life as Onayemi infuses Ziggy’s voice with a knowing attitude that suggests his experiences with the good, the bad, and the ugly of Black life in this time and place. R.O. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
06/29/2020
Randall returns to adult fiction (after The Diary of B. B. Bright, Possible Princess) with a sprawling and intimate genre-bending chronicle of the adventures and tribulations of the extraordinary real-life Detroit emcee and theater director Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson (1913–1968). Through a narrative shaped as a book of saints’s biographies, from poet Robert Hayden to singer Ethel Waters, Ziggy records his encounters with 16 famous and lesser-known characters who made Black Bottom, the commercial and residential heart of Detroit’s black community in the early 20th century, into a destination for “breadwinners” fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of a better life. As Ziggy reflects on his life from his deathbed, the reader learns about the family he made from strangers and students—most notably the tennis player Althea Gibson, referred to throughout as “Colored Girl.” Randall’s portrait of black America sheds light on cultural history through startlingly personal moments, such as Ziggy dropping his Women’s Club aunt Sadye Pryor’s name for social currency. Whether chronicling famous historical figures or local characters, Randall makes Ziggy’s saints worthy of his reflection. This works as a memorable love letter to Detroit, as well as a remarkable tableau. Agent: Marie Dutton Brown, Marie Brown Assoc. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and really love this book. So many stories, our stories, Mom's, Bricktop Valda Grey...so many of us NEED to know these stories. Brava, Bravo!" — Whoopi Goldberg
"Black Bottom Saints offers Randall's multihued genius — as author of country music compositions, historical fiction, magazine profiles, essays, editorials, children's books, and screenplays — a splendid venue to shine as she creates a magical world worthy of her magnificent gifts." — Michael Eric Dyson
"Lively, engaging, and often wise." — New York Times Book Review
“Alice Randall's magical Black Bottom Saints evokes Detroit’s legendary Black Bottom, one of America’s most influential, artful Black communities. Her “Caramel Camelot” comes alive in the voice of Ziggy Johnson, whose School of the Theater extravaganzas were actually “citizenship schools” of self discovery, performance and celebration for Black girls. Ziggy’s decades of who's who and what's what weekly columns for the Michigan Chronicle document the “Saints” whose lives and talents created “fifty-two paths from trauma to transcendence.” Effervescent, tragic, proud, and immensely compelling, Black Bottom Saints is a must-read-now triumph.” — Jayne Anne Phillips, National Book Award/NBCC Finalist, author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Shelter, Lark and Termite & Quiet Dell
"Black Bottom Saints is easily the most inventive and musical novel I've read in a decade. Alice Randall has rewritten and re-energized the rules of the American novel!" — Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy, Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Mississippi
“Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints arrives at a critical moment in our nation’s history, and it’s exactly the right book for our times—an entertaining and necessary act of hagiography and a singular hybrid of fiction, biography and history. I wish I could have seen Black Bottom in its heyday—and thrown back a cocktail with Ziggy Johnson—but reading Randall’s latest novel makes me feel that, actually, I have.” — Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and The Good Life
"Alice Randall has done it again! Black Bottom Saints sneaks up on you—telling you the rich story of Black Michigan and Black Detroit in a way that has never been told before. Detroit is not just Motown. Detroit is a stronghold of black America and black culture. This book tells the story. The characters, so rich, the story so strong, so complex. This book is instantly an American classic. Randall is at the top of her form." — Randall Kenan, author of A Visitation of Spirits, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina
"Black Bottom Saints is a tour-de-force; a toast to a mystical, gritty place; a tableau of Black arts and culture centering on Detroit City. Within these finely crafted and luminous pages that readers will never want to leave, Randall has resurrected a lost glitter world. Here, Detroit’s original and best Black neighborhood, with its brilliant, yearning, brave, maddening, and ultimately mortal residents, bursts to colorful life in a flash of incomparable style. This is a ritual calling forth of the blazing spirits of bygone breadwinners, reminding Detroiters, and all Black Americans, that 'Once upon a time, we did it.'" — Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit and Professor of History, Harvard University
“A rambunctious portrait of the “caramel Camelot” that was Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood from the late 1930s to the late 1960s." — New York Times
“Alluring cocktail of a novel." — O, the Oprah Magazine
“…no book has ever brought Detroit’s Black Camelot as radiantly to life as Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints." — New York Journal of Books
“Intriguing and beguiling." — BookPage
“…a gorgeous swirl of fiction." — NPR's Fresh Air
“This works as a memorable love letter to Detroit, as well as a remarkable tableau.” — Publishers Weekly
“an exuberant celebration of the arts…” — Booklist
"Rave." — Literary Hub
“Randall writes this genre-bending story of black achievement with all the zing and fizz of the cocktail recipes sprinkled among the prose profiles of the community’s 'saint' figures – all of whom, including the narrator, are fictionalised versions of real people.” — Monocle Magazine
“The novel's considerable power lies in Randall's vivid conjuring of 20th-century Black lives, Black genius and unforgettable dish. This joyous novel is an act of collective memory.” — Shelf Awareness
"This is the way it was." — Artis Lane
Kiese Laymon
"Black Bottom Saints is easily the most inventive and musical novel I've read in a decade. Alice Randall has rewritten and re-energized the rules of the American novel!"
Whoopi Goldberg
"I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and really love this book. So many stories, our stories, Mom's, Bricktop Valda Grey...so many of us NEED to know these stories. Brava, Bravo!"
New York Times
A rambunctious portrait of the “caramel Camelot” that was Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood from the late 1930s to the late 1960s."
New York Times Book Review
"Lively, engaging, and often wise."
Randall Kenan
"Alice Randall has done it again! Black Bottom Saints sneaks up on you—telling you the rich story of Black Michigan and Black Detroit in a way that has never been told before. Detroit is not just Motown. Detroit is a stronghold of black America and black culture. This book tells the story. The characters, so rich, the story so strong, so complex. This book is instantly an American classic. Randall is at the top of her form."
the Oprah Magazine O
Alluring cocktail of a novel."
Tiya Miles
"Black Bottom Saints is a tour-de-force; a toast to a mystical, gritty place; a tableau of Black arts and culture centering on Detroit City. Within these finely crafted and luminous pages that readers will never want to leave, Randall has resurrected a lost glitter world. Here, Detroit’s original and best Black neighborhood, with its brilliant, yearning, brave, maddening, and ultimately mortal residents, bursts to colorful life in a flash of incomparable style. This is a ritual calling forth of the blazing spirits of bygone breadwinners, reminding Detroiters, and all Black Americans, that 'Once upon a time, we did it.'"
Michael Eric Dyson
"Black Bottom Saints offers Randall's multihued genius — as author of country music compositions, historical fiction, magazine profiles, essays, editorials, children's books, and screenplays — a splendid venue to shine as she creates a magical world worthy of her magnificent gifts."
Jayne Anne Phillips
Alice Randall's magical Black Bottom Saints evokes Detroit’s legendary Black Bottom, one of America’s most influential, artful Black communities. Her “Caramel Camelot” comes alive in the voice of Ziggy Johnson, whose School of the Theater extravaganzas were actually “citizenship schools” of self discovery, performance and celebration for Black girls. Ziggy’s decades of who's who and what's what weekly columns for the Michigan Chronicle document the “Saints” whose lives and talents created “fifty-two paths from trauma to transcendence.” Effervescent, tragic, proud, and immensely compelling, Black Bottom Saints is a must-read-now triumph.”
Jay McInerney
Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints arrives at a critical moment in our nation’s history, and it’s exactly the right book for our times—an entertaining and necessary act of hagiography and a singular hybrid of fiction, biography and history. I wish I could have seen Black Bottom in its heyday—and thrown back a cocktail with Ziggy Johnson—but reading Randall’s latest novel makes me feel that, actually, I have.”
BookPage
Intriguing and beguiling."
New York Journal of Books
…no book has ever brought Detroit’s Black Camelot as radiantly to life as Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints."
Literary Hub
"Rave."
Monocle Magazine
Randall writes this genre-bending story of black achievement with all the zing and fizz of the cocktail recipes sprinkled among the prose profiles of the community’s 'saint' figures – all of whom, including the narrator, are fictionalised versions of real people.
Artis Lane
"This is the way it was."
Booklist
an exuberant celebration of the arts…”
NPR's Fresh Air
…a gorgeous swirl of fiction."
Shelf Awareness
The novel's considerable power lies in Randall's vivid conjuring of 20th-century Black lives, Black genius and unforgettable dish. This joyous novel is an act of collective memory.”
Booklist
an exuberant celebration of the arts…”
Library Journal
03/01/2020
An accomplished songwriter (e.g., "XXX's and OOO's"), NAACP award winner for Soul Food Love, and Phillis Wheatley Award winner for her YA literature, Randall also writes adult fiction, including the myth-challenging The Wind Done Gone. Here, as erstwhile nightclub emcee and gossip columnist Joseph "Ziggy" Johnson lies dying, he decides to compile a book of 52 saints (e.g., Dinah Washington, Joe Louis) he knew from Detroit's Black Bottom during the Great Depression to post-World War II years.
OCTOBER 2020 - AudioFile
Narrators Prentice Onayemi and Imani Parks swap chapters in this chronicle of Detroit in the years 1938-1968, when Black workers streamed into the city looking for work in the car plants. Onayemi creates the voice of Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, nightclub emcee at The Flame and The Driftwood Lodge and gossip columnist covering the celebrated Detroit neighborhood of Black Bottom. Parks employs a distant observational tone as she anchors the emotional side of the story. Motor City comes to life as Onayemi infuses Ziggy’s voice with a knowing attitude that suggests his experiences with the good, the bad, and the ugly of Black life in this time and place. R.O. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-03
The last testament of an African American showbiz insider is here rendered as an impassioned, richly detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking evocation of black culture in 20th century Detroit and beyond.
Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson (1913-1968) was a real-life nightclub impresario, dance studio instructor, and entertainment columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper based in Detroit. As this book begins, Ziggy is near death and also near completion of what he characterizes as a “book of saints,” a collection of profiles and reminiscences of more than 50 personalities, famous, obscure, and in-between, who “whispered encouragement and clapped…forward” him and generations of those soul-nourished and otherwise entertained in the book’s legendary “Black Bottom” neighborhood during the ascendant and boom years of the city’s auto industry. At its outset, this hybrid of portrait gallery, cultural history, and dramatized biography seems to resemble a grand literary equivalent of a “Youth Colossal,” one of Ziggy’s annual Father’s Day nightclub recitals that one of his saints, the poet Robert Hayden, likens to “a W.E.B. DuBois pageant.” But as the portraits accumulate and grow in depth and breadth, they make up an absorbing and poignant account of a glittering age in the life of a once-thriving metropolis. The portraits are punctuated by celebratory “libations,” some of which have so much hard liquor and sugar cubes as to make one fear diabetic shock. Included among Ziggy’s saints: heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; funeral parlor tycoon and political leader Charles Diggs Sr.; NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, who had “come up all kinds of hard, but [whose] ambition was green and vibrant”; UAW negotiator Marc Stepp; actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom Ziggy describes as “the lady who knows no color”); theater director Lloyd George Richards; dancer Lucille Ellis; Sammy Davis Jr., who pops up throughout the narrative, characterized by Ziggy at one point as a “little genius”; Maxine Powell, who taught Motown Records’ stable of emerging stars how to comport themselves on- and offstage; and, at the tail end, Ziggy himself, whose narrative voice is seasoned with such idiosyncrasies as referring to black folks in general as “sepians” and characterizing black factory workers who made up his readers and audiences as “breadwinners.” This last tribute is likely the work of the unofficial collaborator whose own story and embellishments enhance this tapestry. She is referred to throughout as “Colored Girl,” but one suspects she is a surrogate for Randall, a Detroit native whose experiences writing country music likely account for the lyricism, pathos, and down-home humor in her narrative.
If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.
