Kent Wascom. (2013). The Blood of Heaven: A Novel. Grove Atlantic.

Kent Wascom. 2013. The Blood of Heaven: A Novel. Grove Atlantic.

Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven: A Novel. Grove Atlantic, 2013.

Kent Wascom. The Blood of Heaven: A Novel. Grove Atlantic, 2013.

OverDrive Product Record

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   • bioText: Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans in 1986, and spent his childhood in Louisiana and Pensacola, Florida. He attended Louisiana State University and received his MFA from Florida State University. In 2012, he won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, judged by Amy Hempel. Wascom lives in Tallahassee, Florida. The Blood of Heaven is his first novel.
   • name: Kent Wascom

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title

The Blood of Heaven

fullDescription

“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post 
 
A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors.
The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.
The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.
 
“Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Steve Yarbrough
   • content: “When you read as many contemporary novels as I do, it's easy to get jaundiced, because we're awash in hype, and almost nothing ever seems quite as good as it's cracked up to be. So please know that I'm not just giving this young author a pass. I truly can count on the fingers of one hand the number of first novels that have ever excited me this much. Wascom made me think at times of Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier and William Gay, but his vision is very much his own, as is his extraordinary voice. He's left himself a hard act to follow. This book is pure gold."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Bob Shacochis
   • content: “The young Master Wascom arrives at our gates wielding a narrative broadsword, speaking in a monstrous voice, a Louisiana visionary in command of an army of bones and by God he comes to conquer. It's been more than a decade since the literary world has seen such a portentous debut from a novelist prodigy, equal parts savage and savant, and what else is there to say but All hail the future--this boy king has fifty more years of writing to feed our hungry souls."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Robert Olmstead
   • content: “Young Kent Wascom went down to the crossroads and there he made his deal. Or maybe he was just born spirited for this kind of work. Either way, I cannot name such a stunning debut as this one. It reads as not written, but lived and remembered--and how impossible is that? Whoever may own Kent Wascom's soul, The Blood of Heaven will forever be ours."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Sabina Murray
   • content: “The Blood of Heaven is a brilliant comic rant that, with its twisted religious fervor, holds on to the reader and does not let go. Kent Wascom takes a nugget of colonial history--the Aaron Burr Conspiracy--and imbues it with a fiery life. His is a singular, important, and utterly vital voice."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Robert Olen Butler
   • content: “In the present age of cultural strife and national re-definition, a brilliantly resonant novel blooming from America's ever-thus history is just what the zeitgeist deserves. And The Blood of Heaven is as achingly beautiful in its personal story as it is savagely clear-headed in its national story. Kent Wascom has arrived fully-formed as a very important American writer."
6. • premium: False
   • source: William Kittredge
   • content: “Oh America, heart-broken and constantly fought over! The Blood of Heaven is a dark hymn to the ruthless and ruinous early days in the Louisiana fringes of our republic. In the tradition of As I Lay Dying and Flannery O'Connor and Blood Meridian, idiomatic and far off into transgression, this one, from Kent Wascom, bless his genius, is the real deal."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentances shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Wall Street Journal
   • content: “Rendered in lurid, swamp-fever prose swollen with biblical imagery (Burr first appears in the book on horseback, 'hailed like Christ Himself'), the South of Mr. Wascom's imagination is an inferno of plague, vice and slave trafficking. . . . It's that dizzying pace, especially as Angel sets off on a Tarantino-esque rampage of revenge killings, that makes the book so compelling. Mr. Wascom's writing rolls from the page in torrents, like the sermon of a revivalist preacher in the grip of inspiration. You can't help listening, no matter how wicked the message."
9. • premium: False
   • source: New York Journal of Books
   • content: “Though he's not yet 30, Mr. Wascom has the gift, the elusive “it" that tells you on the first page that here is someone worth reading. . . . In its best moments, and there are many, you will slip completely into Wascom's fictional world. . . . You will also be in the presence of a young writer whose talent is obvious, whose sense of narrative is classical and clear, whose understanding of the craft is deep and well-formed and will only get better."
10. • premium: False
    • source: New York Times Book Review
    • content: “[Blood of Heaven] entertains with its energetic language and fast-paced action, and the love story between Angel and his wife is moving in its you-and-me-against-the-world naïveté. Wascom's research is put to good use as the gargantuan forces of history squash Angel and his...
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 11, 2013
      Making brilliant use of a little-known chapter in America’s history, Wascom’s gripping debut captures the pioneer spirit, lawlessness, and religious fervor of the Southern frontier. In the Louisiana Territory in 1799, teenaged Angel Woolsack and his abusive, hellfire-preaching father encounter their equals: preacher Deacon Kemper and his sons. Deacon also deals in guns. Angel becomes blood brother to Samuel Kemper and the two elude their fathers and flee to Natchez, where they alternate between preaching and armed robbery. “I believed crime was spiritual, robbery an act of faith.... In the process, both parties were brought close to God,” Angel says. Eventually they reach the Spanish-owned region known as West Florida, where Angel continues to engage in mayhem and the murder of agents of the law. In time the brothers become involved in Aaron Burr’s treacherous attempt to create an autonomous empire in Louisiana and Mexico. Angel is a hugely flawed hero, mixing biblical cadences with a Southern lilt, and pulsing with violence, religious hysteria, and sexual tension. Weaned on biblical prophecy and an angry deity, he’s unable to resist taking vengeance upon those who oppose him, believing his behavior to be God’s will, and Wascom’s visceral descriptions of slaughter are not for the fainthearted. Yet Angel is also devoted to his pistol-packing bride, Red Kate, and to his handicapped son, and the forces that shape his character and destiny are clear. While Angel is fictional, the Kempers were real figures, legendary for their ambition. In its depiction of a primitive, savage era and of man’s depravity, as well as its sensitive portrayal of souls “drowned in the blood of Heaven,” Wascom’s novel is a masterly achievement. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 15, 2013
      

      Wascom's debut novel elucidates the messy nature of nation building on the early American frontier. Set mainly in West Florida (comprised of parts of current-day Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) around 1800, the book follows Angel Woolsack through his transformation from preacher to robber to freedom fighter to hero for independence from Spanish rule as Angel joins his adopted brothers in the effort to free West Florida. Aaron Burr features as a fascinating and enigmatic character involved in the ongoing plotting. Ideals of manifest destiny mask the violence and internecine warfare, which is more about settling scores than about freedom. The struggle between wealthy slave holders and populist leaders like the Kemper brothers makes the novel an interesting examination of class warfare. Angel develops insight when he becomes blind and then is blinded to the suffering of others when his sight returns and he becomes a black-market slave dealer. VERDICT This highly readable saga is both charming and intense. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian meets Devils Dream by Madison Smartt Bell. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/12.]--Henry Bankhead, Santa Clara Cty. Lib., CA

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post 
 
A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors.
The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of...

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