Babylon Rolling

by Amanda Boyden

Book Overview

Ariel May and her husband, Ed, have just moved to New Orleans with their two small children. Their neighbor, Fearius, is a fifteen-year-old just out of juvenile detention. Across the street, an elderly couple, the Browns, are only trying to pass their days in peace, while Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges, a longtime resident and "Uptown lady," peers through her curtains at the East Indian family next door.With one random accident, a scene of horror...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307388247
• ISBN13: 9780307388247
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Story - Not just for New Orleans lovers

Babylon Rolling is an amazing novel. It is a great portrait of New Orleans but that is not the only reason to buy the book. Race relations, class differences and marital relationships are also essential elements of this book. The author delves into each of these and allows you to see the same events through the eyes of different people. She is able to give the point of view of a wide variety of people: an African American drug dealer, an environmentalist whose wife is considering an affair and a nosy neighbor whose husband is dying of cancer. The story is also a portrait of pre-Katrina New Orleans. It is the days of Hurricane Ivan and the characters buckle down while attending "hurricane parties." The citizens of New Orleans have yet to see the amazing damage and pain a hurricane can cause. The story is addictive and very difficult to put down.

Stunning portait of New Orleans

Amanda Boyden's second novel, Babylon Rolling, presents a remarkable vision of New Orleans at the brink of disaster, a storm about to arrive that will tear out the heart of the city. While telling a remarkable story focused on a particular New Orleans neighborhood, Boyden wisely understands that any present day reader will see the city and the novel through the lens of Katrina. There she lets it lie, our awareness that a storm is coming that will end the city's life as it had existed before. In her portraits of New Orleans immigrants, natives, people of all races, this author displays an acute ability to render voice and make a drama that engages fully in that moment of the city before the disaster struck, when the lives of its citizens were already preoccupied by personal and private disasters. To list the people you meet here in this novel would do a disservice to their proper introductions in the novel, but the sum of it is that you will meet the whole of New Orleans in these pages, vibrantly represented. Few novels about this city have ever succeeded so well. Boyden shows remarkable growth from her astonishing, powerful first novel, Pretty Little Dirty. She has broadened her scope and displayed both her ambitions and her ability to achieve them. In this era of tentative publishing she has written a bold, daring novel that dares to incorporate a piece of all of us, and of our world, in its pages. The ending is stunning and cathartic, a vision of a city at the edge of a storm that will resonate in reader's minds for weeks afterward.

Suprisingly Real New Orleans

As a native Texan who spent the first eight years of my young, married life in New Orleans' Irish Channel, Boyden's Orchid Street was just as vivid, just as real as my own block of Pleasant Street. A young woman who had rarely ventured out of my sheltered, suburban life, I experienced New Orleans with a child's wide eyes. Nothing was lost on me. Now, as I read books and watch movies set in New Orleans, I have a skeptic's harsh view, "that's not how they'd do things there. . . that would never really happen. . . they don't really talk like that in New Orleans." But Babylon Rolling surprised me. The language is rich and true, the characters could easily be the same people I walked and talked with on my Pleasant Street porch, and the events that unfolded held me transfixed, because I cared about these fascinating people of Orchid Street. If you love New Orleans, you'll love Babylon Rolling, and like me, you won't be able to wait for Amanda Boyden's next creation.

A Powerful and Heartbreaking Novel

I can think of perhaps five other books that so consumed my days and then kept me up at night by lamplight. And I can think of no other novel that so beautifully renders in the reader's imagination the city of New Orleans. Amanda Boyden accomplishes no easy feat in this novel. The novel is told in five distinct voices, and I found myself rooting for and then against and then, once again, for the five protagonists at various points in the story. The characters are incredibly complex. Like anybody else, they are flawed, but they are not without their redemptive merits. And, as Hurricane Katrina gathers force in the Gulf and the book comes to a heartbreaking climax--well, I won't ruin the ending, but I will say that this book will stick with you long after you've put it down (and, if you're reading experience was anything like mine, you'll finish the book about two days after you first picked it up). My highest possible recommendation.

"We love a place that cannot be saved by levees."

It is no mean feat for a fiction writer to own characters of varied cultural identities, each adding personal nuance to a helter-skelter patchwork of personalities that make up Orchid Street in New Orleans, from a transplanted Minneapolis family to new East Indian neighbors to the mixture of black and white families that make up an eclectic, low-key neighborhood, including a local bar, the Tokyo Rose. Boyden frames her cast with a deft touch, defining subtle differences and similarities as they interact, beginning in the summer of 2004, through the threat of Hurricane Ivan, the Katrina disaster just over the horizon for these unsuspecting folks. Orchid Street is pure New Orleans, a city of divergent tastes and interests with a big heart and a penchant for celebration. Here the slightly more affluent reside near the less fortunate, sidewalk barbeques drawing people from their homes, the summer heat, ice-cold beer and the easy camaraderie of life old and new, always in transition. Everybody has their problems; life is tough, but they look out for one another when the occasion calls for it. With a tough-talking, street wise Richard Wright style of narrative, Boyden takes no prisoners, her protagonists explicitly defined: Ed and Ariel, he a Buddhist househusband, she the general manager of a French Quarter hotel, La Belle Nouvelle, catering to a clientele of edgy rappers and their outrageous entourages; the elderly neighborhood fixtures, Roy and Cerise Brown, a couple of great generosity and kindness, Roy often setting up his barbeque for the neighbors, Cerise preparing her spicy fare; Philomenia (Prancie) Beauregard de Bruges and her cancer-riddled husband, Joe, she with a plan to alter the serenity of Orchid Street with an excessive bounty of food, he languishing in a dark bedroom awaiting the end; the Gupta's, the newest folks on the block, Indira in her brilliant saris, the mild-mannered Ganesh taking everything, including Ivan, in stride; Sharon Harris and her excitable brood, a gaggle of grandbabies overflowing the ramshackle dwelling; and Sharon's son, Daniel, street name Fearius, a young man with gangsta ambitions, running drugs and desperately building up street cred, recently graduated from box cutter to gun. From the opening chapter, when we meet the misguided Fearius, it is clear that trouble is brewing, that each home on Orchid Street hides its own problems and heartaches; all of these people will interact until a bloody resolution. What will be the catalyst and who will be left standing, lives still intact? Boyden fully inhabits these characters, moving seamlessly from one to another, always aware of the family challenges and the cultural pressures that cause a young man with no future to exceed the boundaries of reason. Small dramas inform the plot, from marital infidelity to the unbalanced, slow-burning rage of a disturbed woman, good intentions overriding the most egregious behavior of a few. A freak accident, the threat of a hurr