Trouble the Saints Audiobook By Alaya Dawn Johnson cover art

Trouble the Saints

A Novel

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Trouble the Saints

By: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Narrated by: Neil Shah, Shayna Small
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"Narrators Shayna Small and Neil Shah transport listeners to 1940s New York in this dark fantasy set against a backdrop of racial tension and brewing war.... Both narrators also excel at a range of accents, making this audiobook a fully immersive experience." (AudioFile Magazine)

The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson's timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to change her fate at the dawn of World War II.

Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.

Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything - not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams.

Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side - and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it’s too late - is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?

Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel - a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines - and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

“Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story...in a word: Awesome.” (N.K. Jemisin, New York Times best-selling author of The Fifth Season)

©2020 Alaya Dawn Johnson (P)2020 Macmillan Audio African American Classics Fantasy Historical Heartfelt
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I found it a bit hard to follow with all the jumps between present, and before. BUT the voice acting was exceptional. AND, at the end of the day it's a beautiful love story with some very lovely prose.
I found the story a bit difficult to get through, but some of the verbiage and the idea of the power of love made it worth the listen. For me at least.
Think maybe because I grew up on old black and white movie dialog and voices.

Lovely, but difficult.

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On one hand, I hesitate to call this a noir, since--for all its bleakness--holds out the promise of a better future; if not in the characters' lifetimes, then someday. But on the other, it hits all the beats: dark tone; morally dubious characters; violence; explicit sex; a criminal setting and a cynical--that is, accurate--view on American history and society. But that really doesn't do it justice. The relationships in the story are so profound; their love for each other so potent. It's the unflinching ugliness of the world, made worth bearing for the love of your community--friends, family; ancestors, descendents--that does it for me. Just marvelous

The performances are also very good; both narrators do a great job of giving each character a distinctive voice, and then mirroring those voices between them

A clear-eyed, purposeful noir; a story of profound love

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I wish I had known the story was broken into three parts with three different narratives. I was left a bit confused when the plot climaxed a few hours in.
I was very moved by the way the characters are driven by the “gifts” they posses; the way it forces them to think about how they interact with the people around them and the discrimination they are immersed in.
This book kept me reading with themes of privilege, right and wrong, guilt, and the struggle to chose action vs safety, and others over yourself.

Solid and Thought Provoking

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