Product Description
From the acclaimed author of Pretty Little Dirty ("a first novel of complex truth and beauty"--San Francisco Chronicle), comes a glittering, gritty, and unflinching story of five families--black, white, and Indian--living along one block of Uptown, New Orleans.

It is the summer of 2004, and Orchid Street is changing. Newcomers Ariel May and her husband, Ed, relocated from Minnesota, are trying to make sense of the Southern city. From her front porch, Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges watches her new neighbors, the Guptas, as they move into one of the biggest homes. Across the way, Daniel Harris, aka Fearius, has just been released from juvenile detention. And Cerise Brown, a longtime resident now in her late seventies, hopes only to pass the rest of her days in peace.

But with one random accident, a scene of horror on Cerise's front lawn, the whole neighborhood converges on the sidewalk to help, to cast blame, and to offer hope. And as Hurricane Ivan churns his way toward the city, bringing a different series of challenges, these new relationships tighten, intertwining the families' paths for better and for worse.

Told in five achingly real voices, Babylon Rolling is the story of one year on Orchid Street, a place where lives clash and collide, and where the humid air is charged with constant wanting. Offering a bold understanding of human nature and the hidden prejudices we harbor, Babylon Rolling is a powerful portrait of racism in America and a city on the edge of transformation.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 10 reviews)

Fantastic Story - Not just for New Orleans lovers

Babylon Rolling is an amazing novel. It is a great portrait of New Orleans but that is not the only reason to buy the book.

Race relations, class differences and marital relationships are also essential elements of this book. The author delves into each of these and allows you to see the same events through the eyes of different people. She is able to give the point of view of a wide variety of people: an African American drug dealer, an environmentalist whose wife is considering an affair and a nosy neighbor whose husband is dying of cancer.

The story is also a portrait of pre-Katrina New Orleans. It is the days of Hurricane Ivan and the characters buckle down while attending "hurricane parties." The citizens of New Orleans have yet to see the amazing damage and pain a hurricane can cause.

The story is addictive and very difficult to put down.
December 27, 2008

Stunning portait of New Orleans

Amanda Boyden's second novel, Babylon Rolling, presents a remarkable vision of New Orleans at the brink of disaster, a storm about to arrive that will tear out the heart of the city. While telling a remarkable story focused on a particular New Orleans neighborhood, Boyden wisely understands that any present day reader will see the city and the novel through the lens of Katrina. There she lets it lie, our awareness that a storm is coming that will end the city's life as it had existed before. In her portraits of New Orleans immigrants, natives, people of all races, this author displays an acute ability to render voice and make a drama that engages fully in that moment of the city before the disaster struck, when the lives of its citizens were already preoccupied by personal and private disasters. To list the people you meet here in this novel would do a disservice to their proper introductions in the novel, but the sum of it is that you will meet the whole of New Orleans in these pages, vibrantly represented. Few novels about this city have ever succeeded so well. Boyden shows remarkable growth from her astonishing, powerful first novel, Pretty Little Dirty. She has broadened her scope and displayed both her ambitions and her ability to achieve them. In this era of tentative publishing she has written a bold, daring novel that dares to incorporate a piece of all of us, and of our world, in its pages. The ending is stunning and cathartic, a vision of a city at the edge of a storm that will resonate in reader's minds for weeks afterward.
September 16, 2008

Suprisingly Real New Orleans

As a native Texan who spent the first eight years of my young, married life in New Orleans' Irish Channel, Boyden's Orchid Street was just as vivid, just as real as my own block of Pleasant Street. A young woman who had rarely ventured out of my sheltered, suburban life, I experienced New Orleans with a child's wide eyes. Nothing was lost on me. Now, as I read books and watch movies set in New Orleans, I have a skeptic's harsh view, "that's not how they'd do things there. . . that would never really happen. . . they don't really talk like that in New Orleans." But Babylon Rolling surprised me. The language is rich and true, the characters could easily be the same people I walked and talked with on my Pleasant Street porch, and the events that unfolded held me transfixed, because I cared about these fascinating people of Orchid Street. If you love New Orleans, you'll love Babylon Rolling, and like me, you won't be able to wait for Amanda Boyden's next creation.
September 02, 2008

Babylon Knowing

I'm not sure if I read the same novel as another, less favorable, reviewer. Cinematically, I thought of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where critical mass is reached by seemingly small circumstances. I taught English to kids just like Fearius, and Boyden's representation of Nola's dialect [and the checkerboard neighborhoods] sounds dead-on to me. Sometimes a keen ear or eye comes from an author without a native bias; however, according to the Boyden's bio she has lived in Nola for over 15 years--including displacement and return from Katrina. Nevertheless, I am from a reading perspective that holds the text itself as the object of literary and aesthetic criticism, not the author. [For example, I wouldn't bias my reading of book by woman who writes from the point of view of a male narrator.] For me, as a person who lived in Nola and has just returned after a 5 year absence, Babylon Rolling not only shook me enough to see my own Irish Channel in the narrative, but it also reminded me how much the city's residents are intimately connected, even when we force ourselves to think otherwise. The paradox, of course, lay in the fact that this seems unique to Nola, but also, all urban neighborhoods have similar interconnectedness. Hence, though the book is ostensibly about Nola, it is, as well, a universal reminder to us all that our neighbors affect our lives.
August 27, 2008

Too picky, I guess

I bought it because I'm a New Orleans native and because it was well received here at Amazon. But as lovely as some of the prose could be, there was just something off key with the story, with its tone, and especially with the dialogue and monologues. At times, I felt that the source material was right out of the HBO series 'The Wire', down to the idea that a black kid out of juvey with drug lord aspirations thinks in terms of chess moves or calls his drugs "the product." Baltimore maybe. New Orleans no way. There is an insane upper crust white woman who keeps a journal filled with sarcastic misobservations of her neighbors a la 'Notes on a Scandal.' These things jar the narrative for me. But what I find most peculiar is the absence of certain standard colloquialisms, particularly those used in the black community and across all wards, that are absolutely missing in this book which is supposed to be a character study of New Orleans. There are certain sayings and expressions a New Orleanian would know without necessarily having much to do with the black community, things a writer with an interested ear would pick up online at the grocery. They are not in the novel at all. How is this possible? On the other hand, the novel consistently uses a vernacular that is not at all particular to New Orleans. It's distracting. [Ok, hol' on an listen up: I been livbin' in New Orleans my hol' life an I ain' neber heard no one talkin' 'bout how they "best do this" or they "best done that", especially no black folks.] The author is a former trapeze artist, a career which has been used as an analogy for her writing gifts. But I think it is also an appropriate analogy for her writing weaknesses: she is flying so high above her subject that she is slightly out of earshot and slightly out of view of the real city. Another problem I have is the author's uneven tone--is it satire, is it irony? I don't know. Out of the entire cast, I felt empathy for only one character and frankly none for the city at all. I guess all the tragedy I've personally witnessed and continue to witness since Katrina makes me sensitive about a writer approaching New Orleans without a truly vested emotional commitment to it. I don't know. I just didn't feel it here. Still, this is a book that can be finished in a day or two; it is interesting and there are patches of beautiful writing throughout, so for a light read I would recommend it. But only for a light read.
August 24, 2008

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