Deacon King Kong in The Reading For Pleasure Book Club

Mar 26, 2024 John Warner rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, literary-fiction, humorous, lgbtq, jsw-aty-2024-read, bipoc, alcoholism

Welcome to the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project, and its colorful collection of characters. The religious and social hub of this poor neighborhood is the Five Ends Baptist Church. One of its church leaders is Deacon Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin. One September 1969 afternoon, Sportcoat walks out to the flagpole in the center of the housing project's plaza and shoots off an ear of Deems Clemens, the neighborhood drug dealer with a .45-caliber Luger and escapes into the projects. Sportc ...more

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Feb 24, 2022 Andria rated it really liked it

...and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Deacon King Kong is a multi-layered story told from multiple perspectives surrounding a neighborhood in ...and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Deacon King Kong is a multi-layered story told from multiple perspectives surrounding a neighborhood in New York in 1969. We’re introduced to a whole cast of characters - the old drunk deacon Sportcoat and his dead wife Hettie, the Cousins who break into fights all the time in church, the local Italian gangster The Elephant who runs the local dock, the young drug pusher Deems who gave up the chance to play professional baseball for the promise of getting rich quick on the street.

It’s about community, poverty, race, but it’s also about a missing artifact worth millions, a budding mob war, and a neighborhood trying to figure out why the local drunk who wouldn’t hurt a fly shot an ear off a lead drug runner in the middle of the day. The story is told in a collection of different voices and points of view, with long, meandering paragraphs like being told a story from an old neighbor on the building stoop. Some passages are laugh out loud hilarious, others unsettling, others warm and heartfelt.

I found most of the characters likable, and those who weren't were at least curious enough to want to know more about their stories. I enjoyed unraveling the Venus mystery and the tying together of multiple threads of stories by the end. Some storylines wrapped themselves up in more satisfying fashion than others. (The gang war was one area I thought fell a bit flat after all the build up.)

All in all, a really good book. Memorable characters, a real community living and breathing around you. The theme of inequality is written into the everyday life of this neighborhood - the race dynamics, the have and have nots, the disinterested white elite a jump away in Manhattan. It's so vibrant, so full of life, heavy with despair but also a warm touch of hope. ...more

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May 16, 2021 Ellen Librarian rated it it was amazing

The sweetest story you could possibly imagine involving drug dealers, the Mafia and a drunk at the center of it all. There's also a church, a housing project in Brooklyn and a cop. The story is a bit over the top but the author makes it so believable, you never doubt it for a second.

The book is a little slow to get going but unless you're some major curmudgeon, you probably won't be sorry if you stick with it. ...more

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