Christopher Hebert. (2016). Angels of Detroit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Christopher Hebert. 2016. Angels of Detroit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Christopher Hebert, Angels of Detroit. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

Christopher Hebert. Angels of Detroit. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

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     Christopher Hebert is the author of the novel The Boiling Season, winner of the of the 2013 Friends of American Writers award. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as FiveChapters, Cimarron Review, Narrative, Interview, and the Millions. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is editor-at-large for the University of Michigan Press. Hebert is currently the Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries and lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

   • name: Christopher Hebert

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title

Angels of Detroit

fullDescription

Once an example of American industrial might, Detroit has gone bankrupt, its streets dark, its storefronts vacant. Miles of city blocks lie empty, saplings growing through the cracked foundations of abandoned buildings.

In razor-sharp, beguiling prose, Angels of Detroit draws us into the lives of multiple characters struggling to define their futures in this desolate landscape: a scrappy group of activists trying to save the city with placards and protests; a curious child who knows the blighted city as her own personal playground; an elderly great-grandmother eking out a community garden in an oil-soaked patch of dirt; a carpenter with an explosive idea of how to give the city a new start; a confused idealist who has stumbled into debt to a human trafficker; a weary corporate executive who believes she is doing right by the city she remembers at its prime—each of their desires is distinct, and their visions for a better city are on a collision course.

In this propulsive, masterfully plotted epic, an urban wasteland whose history is plagued with riots and unrest is reimagined as an ambiguous new frontier—a site of tenacity and possible hope. Driven by struggle and suspense, and shot through with a startling empathy, Christopher Hebert's magnificent second novel unspools an American story for our time.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: Written in evocative prose with careful detail, this is a veracious portrayal of a decimated city. It moves at an exciting pace, the various plot threads braiding rapidly. Most poignant is the insight offered about those fighting to amend the damage. These characters are flawed and more appealing for it. Perhaps Hebert intends to suggest that this is true of the city itself. An expansive yet intimate tale of the efforts made to save a decaying Detroit.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: Hebert tells this story through the interactions of eleven major characters whose lives intersect in subtle and suspenseful ways. . . . [He] wonderfully brings out his ensemble's human qualities, whether they're fearful, compassionate, or tenacious.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Shelf Awareness
   • content: Ambitious, well-paced, observant—Angels of Detroit is a first-rate novel of flawed but admirable characters who want a brighter future in what one of them calls 'the new Old West.'
4. • premium: False
   • source: Belt Magazine
   • content: Written with vivid compassion, Hebert's characters represent Detroit's many generations, races, and socioeconomic divisions. As their lives intersect, a multifaceted Detroit takes shape: a city to grieve, and a city just getting started.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Detroit Free Press
   • content: A humbler, more endearing bunch of rainbow-hued misfits never fumbled their broken-hearted way towards revolution than those we meet in Christopher Hebert's Angels of Detroit—truly a novel of our moment, both in the way it stares unsentimentally at the real trouble we are in—a world of poisoned children and cities in ruins—and in the deep and detailed empathy it shows for characters of every class and provenance. Hebert gets Detroit right, in this beautifully made book: his careful drawing of its physical catastrophe locates the city at the exact boundary between gritty-real and surreal, between last hope and post-apocalyptic nightmare.
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 9, 2016
     Hebert’s second novel (after The Boiling Season) is a gritty portrayal of Detroit as a crumbling industrial city that has become an economic and social wasteland, sparsely populated by unfortunate people who have nowhere else to go. The Motor City has been virtually abandoned by industries, businesses, and residents, “a landscape full of monuments to loss and oblivion,” leaving those few who remain resigned to despair. Hebert tells this story through the interactions of 11 major characters whose lives intersect in subtle and suspenseful ways. Dobbs is a hapless drifter unwillingly involved with human traffickers. Constance is a great-grandmother trying to coax a vegetable garden out of toxic soil. Michael is a carpenter with explosive ideas for cleansing the city. Mrs. Freeman is a corporate shill with a guilty conscience. Clementine is a 10-year-old girl with vacant neighborhoods as her playground. An insecure corporate security guard and five young, idealistic, inept anti-corporate urban terrorists round out this crafty morality tale of good people making bad decisions. Nobody pays any attention to these people; the five young terrorists can’t even get the cops to come to their amateur protest demonstrations. But then somebody starts blowing up empty buildings. Hebert wonderfully brings out his ensemble’s human qualities, whether they’re fearful, compassionate, or tenacious. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 1, 2016
     An ensemble novel set against the backdrop of a ruined and abandoned Detroit. Hebert's (The Boiling Season, 2012) sweeping tale follows the intersecting lives of a diverse cast of characters, each struggling in his or her own way to persevere. There's Dobbs, a dispassionate, insomniac college dropout who, looking to distance himself from his upbringing and align himself with "bottom-feeders" more suited for survival in a dying world, transports and harbors illegal aliens. There's a band of protesters, led by the bold and destructive McGee, whose attempts at dissent and demonstration fall far short of their expectations. There's Ruth Freeman, a powerful but jaded director of corporate communications at HSI--the remaining pillar of Detroit industry, producing everything from weapons and drones to toasters and fetal heart monitors--who to the protestors is a criminal and to her fellow HSI board members is a stubborn snag in their mission to desert the city. There's Darius, who is alternately loyal to HSI, where he works as a security guard, and aligned with the subversive movement; his dubious moral center is underlined by an affair with his teenage neighbor. There's Michael Boni, a lapsed carpenter living in his deceased grandmother's house, who dreams of demolishing Detroit's neglected buildings and growing flora in their place, an ambition inspired by the quiet garden work of his elderly neighbor, Constance. For Michael, "the lettuce was an opening salvo, a declaration of war." The most poignant and appealing of these characters are Constance and her great-granddaughter, Clementine. From nothing, with only sporadically helpful neighbors, Constance cultivates a lush crop in her backyard, opens a restaurant furnished with found goods, and is a taciturn, unapologetic force for community good. Written in evocative prose with careful detail, this is a veracious portrayal of a decimated city. It moves at an exciting pace, the various plot threads braiding rapidly. Most poignant is the insight offered about those fighting to amend the damage. These characters are flawed and more appealing for it. Perhaps Hebert intends to suggest that this is true of the city itself. An expansive yet intimate tale of the efforts made to save a decaying Detroit.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2016
     Whether Detroit, Michigan, is a familiar stomping ground or merely conjures a vague connection with American midwestern industry and energy, Hebert's (The Boiling Season, 2012) powerful novel will produce chills. In the history of the world, great cities have risen to the challenges of their time and fallen after succumbing to the illusion of their own importance. In the U.S., no city characterizes this cycle as poetically as Detroit, gone bankrupt after it lost its foothold in the manufacturing industry. As depicted here, it is precisely that: a city that awakened one morning to find that nothing passes by so certainly or so cruelly as success. Now scrambling for viable options, Hebert's current residentsactivists, planners, takers, opportunists, and optimists still living in a city that looks war-guttedare undertaking to shake off the shroud of how-did-this-happen and discover renewed vigor. Hebert's tenacious prose, often as bleak as this all sounds, is nonetheless the metaphor for hanging on as it drives the narrative and brings characters like McGee, Michael Boni, Darius, Constance, and the rest to visceral life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2016
     

     Winner of the 2013 Friends of American Writers Award, Hebert's The Boiling Season addressed issues of social concern in taut, evocative language. Here he tells the story of devastated Detroit through interlocking characters, from persevering activists to a great-grandmother tending her garden to an idealistic carpenter. Hebert is currently the Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Once an example of American industrial might, Detroit has gone bankrupt, its streets dark, its storefronts vacant. Miles of city blocks lie empty, saplings growing through the cracked foundations of abandoned buildings.

In razor-sharp, beguiling prose, Angels of Detroit draws us into the lives of multiple characters struggling to define their futures in this desolate landscape: a scrappy group of activists trying to save the city with placards and protests; a curious child who knows the blighted city as her own personal playground; an elderly great-grandmother eking out a community garden in an oil-soaked patch of dirt; a carpenter with an explosive idea of how to give the city a new start; a confused idealist who has stumbled into debt to a human trafficker; a weary corporate executive who believes she is doing right by the city she remembers at its prime—each of their desires is distinct, and their visions for a better city are on a collision course....

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