Thirty-six hours after the event, workers pull from the rubble 42-year-old Anthony Carter, an unemployed biracial schoolteacher and recovering coke addict. In the days\u2014and daze\u2014that follows, he doesn\u2019t find religion as much as it finds him in the form of a female prophet. Targeting him with her \u201craging aviary of disembodied howls and shouts,\u201d she helps transform him into an unlikely motivational speaker and media star. But close observers, including young freelance photographer Felix Pearl, find something a bit off about Carter\u2019s inspirational words, like he was \u201ctrying and failing to hold on to a rapidly dissolving fragment of a dream.\u201d Police detective Mary Roe, who barely survived a calamitous elevator accident and is now obsessed with finding a missing survivor of the tenement collapse, doesn\u2019t know what to make of Carter. And postal worker Anne Collins, who is instantly drawn to him after they lock gazes across an outdoor event, flees the relationship just as quickly. Price\u2019s first novel since The Whites (2015)\u2014a work of crime fiction written under the pen name Harry Brandt\u2014shows off his usual mastery of urban life, including what a community activist calls \u201cour Death-style,\u201d embodied in the unforgettable image of a kid who \u201cwas eating Chinese right before he was shot and the pellets blew the white rice right out through his back.\u201d But the author is mostly in a kinder and gentler mode, affectingly capturing the complicated domestic lives that help people cope in difficult times. For all the darkness in the novel with its 9\/11 overtones, there\u2019s a sense of transcendence in the Harlem community\u2019s shared experience and survivors\u2019 spirit.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirty-six hours after the event, workers pull from the rubble 42-year-old Anthony Carter, an unemployed biracial schoolteacher and recovering coke addict. In the days\u2014and daze\u2014that follows, he doesn\u2019t find religion as much as it finds him in the form of a female prophet. Targeting him with her \u201craging aviary of disembodied howls and shouts,\u201d she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}