Deacon King Kong (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel Paperback – February 2, 2021

Lively read! Rich storytelling. Read it and listen to the audio. There’s so much going on with a lot of characters. You must stay focus to follow along!

A good friend recommended this book. For the first hundred pages, I found it a struggle to read because every chapter is from a different character's perspective. But after the first hundred pages I began to get a sense of the larger story and by the end, I was hooked. Perhaps I'll pick up another book by James McBride.

Had a lot of laughs with this book. This was the second book I read by James. Not as good as Heaven’s Grocery Store, but right up there.

It's one of these rare books that you don't want to ever end. The story is written by a real talent. It is funny, witty, engaging, and inspiring. You can't avoid falling in love with these simple, good-hearted, inspiring characters who struggle to live their very basic and deprived lives, and yet they are full of belief and optimism and, surprisingly, can convey their good spirits to the reader. The storyline is full and rich. As the story unveils, missing parts fall into their place, and the story achieves its completeness. The spoken language fantastically follows the actual slang yet is charming and easy to follow. This was a most pleasing reading, and I'm sure I'll read more books by the author.

To say this book had my heart from the start would be a bald-faced lie. Chapter 1 introduced so many characters, I made notes as to who was who. Even so, I couldn't keep them straight, especially the minor characters and the drug dealers. The truth is this book infuriated me. I slammed it shut numerous times. I wanted to throw it against the wall. I rolled my eyes and complained to my husband. I interrupted my reading of it with two other books.But I kept coming back.This often lyrical book is set in 1969 in the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn. Fumbling, old Cuffy Lambkin, deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church, is known affectionately as Sportcoat because of the ratty sports jackets he wears. Behind his back, he's known as Deacon King Kong for his penchant (shall we say addiction?) for the hooch his friend Rufus brews up. Like its namesake, Rufus's King Kong carries a powerful punch, but Sportcoat drinks it like Kool-Aid. In fact, he's so drunk when he shoots the project's young drug dealer at point-blank range with an old .38, he doesn't remember doing it.But Sportcoat has a good heart. He taught Sunday School. He coached the first-ever Causeway baseball team. He works at a number of day jobs, including helping the elderly mother of a local crime boss in her garden. And he loved his wife, Hettie, but not enough.This is a book of what-if, what-was, and what-could-be. What if Sister Paul hadn't driven the Elephant's father home one fateful night? What if Sportcoat had chosen moonflowers over booze? What if Deems hadn't ended his promising future by selling heroin for his cousin? The what-was comes out in pieces, and sometimes the what-could-be actually happens. Ultimately, it's a book of redemption.I tried to finish the book one night but got irritated with it. The next morning I read the last chapter. I think I held my breath the entire time. Everything came together, and the last beautiful paragraph had me in tears.This book I wanted to throw against the wall gets five shining stars.

The central character here is Sportcoat, an old alcoholic who lives in the Cause Houses, a project in New York. The narrative, however winds around him, a drug dealing former baseball prodigy, a smuggler called The Elephant, and a host of other characters in around the neighborhood and its church, The Five Ends. No spoiler, but Sportcoat shoots the drug dealer; chaos ensues. Like, literally, the story goes all over the place, but not entirely in a bad way.I struggled to read this one, as in, I put it down for months and had to force myself to pick it back up. After some soul searching, I’ve come up with a few reasons. One, central to the course of events is all these ‘church people’ who do drugs, gossip, drink to excess, and lots of infidelity; not a knock on the writing, just a pet peeve of mine. Two, it’s a tragedy-fest for the most part; for example the titular character is an aged alcoholic, probably demented, grieving the death of his wife, and doing stuff he doesn’t recall doing the next minute. Three, I zone out and put it down in the middle bit, where all the various narratives were meandering a bit, as they needed to for the full effect; I have ADD.So, the characters are lively and colorful and engaging. The setting is immersive, illustrative of a slice of Americana, and well rendered. I spent a lot of the book knowing where the mystery was leading, so not a surprise, but I’m not sure it was meant to be, as the whole thing was more of a character study of life in the projects than a thriller. You’ll also find this thread of frustrated, awkward love throughout. Though not as overtly explored for most of the book, there is the idea of redemption, especially redemption in Christ, woven into things. I was not a fan of the ending, but I’ll leave that to you; I just felt that some narrative arcs dwindled to nothing and others got tied up in too neat of a bow for the overall tone of the book.