Just spent most of the day finishing it because I couldn’t put it down. I think it’s wonderful. As I said before, I would like to get a little more feel for K.C. situation at the beginning–the race barrier, the gender, the common expectations of a young girl at the time, etc. But other than that, it is an amazing mosaic of the times. I love the balance throughout–not everyone is racist or open minded, pro or anti union, etc. I love that Jack is such a great guy overall making K.C.’s choice that much more difficult.
 
Karen Nortman, author of The Time Travel Trailer Series

Kasey (or “K.C.” as she prefers to style her first name in accordance with her musical aspirations) Brown hails from a staid and conventional family of the staid and conventional city of Waterton, Iowa, a thinly veiled representation of Waterloo, Iowa, the hometown of the authors. Waterton is the main venue of Hammon Falls, a previously published novel of the writing team of Dave Hoing and Roger Hileman and there is a minor tie-in to the former work via a character’s now deceased father. Nineteen-year-old Kasey is, however, far from conventional in a place and era where and when traditional Christian morality and mores have a stranglehold over “decent society.” Kasey is rather a renegade, at odds with her parents over her passion and goal in life to become a professional musician as well as her “loose” sexual habits, at least as defined by her times.
 
Although she doesn’t cohabitate, forbidden in her apartment building – and probably by law then – her boyfriend Jack occasionally spends nights with her as the building’s manager turns a blind eye, less out of sympathy, as one gets the impression, than a reluctance to make waves and jeopardize the loss of a paying tenant. Complicating Kasey’s seemingly serious relationship with Jack is her parents’ antipathy towards him bred from a long ago high school feud between the young lovers’ mothers, not to mention rumors of the young man having taken liberties with their daughter’s honor, presumably having led her into a course of ill repute.
 
The year is 1948. Kasey and Jack work in a local grocery store as Jack, having narrowly escaped the WWII draft, attends college in preparation for becoming an economics teacher, an ambition that Kasey finds respectable yet boring as she envisions herself consigned to a lifetime of being a housewife and mother like one of her more conventional two older sisters. (The other is also somewhat estranged from their parents over her vocational choice of opening a dance studio, a profession they find less than respectable for a young woman of her background.) Such a fate is most decidedly not to the heretical Kasey’s more exotic tastes.
 
Although a gifted pianist with virtuoso potential, Kasey’s first love is the alto sax, an instrument that features prominently in jazz, a musical genre developed by African-American musicians and still dominated by them. She therefore aspires to join a local black jazz band comprised of middle-aged men or near, which establishes the seemingly preposterous premise of the novel, a young white woman publicly playing with older black musicians in such a segregationist and outright racist era. This reviewer was most skeptical but read on to gradually have his doubts dispelled as the writers adroitly navigate the pitfalls of what appears to be such an absurd narrative arc.
 
Kasey, responding to a newspaper advertisement, auditions for a jazz band called The Bluenotes, a musical reference to a jazz technique of playing or singing a piece a tad flat for effect, in a black section of town in a club called the New Orleans, but pronounced by all as the “Narlins.” It is owned and operated by a widow named Ruthie, a no-nonsense, black businesswoman with a sardonic wit who nevertheless often displays a sympathetic and compassionate underlying nature. The band is managed by Dwayne Hite, an educated and always impeccably dressed man who has retired as a performer in order to concentrate on his band and composing “charts” (musical compositions), often variations of songs he has lifted from other bands, a standard practice within the jazz scene of the era.
 
The band’s booking agent is Freddie Ross who is also its trombonist. Ross has badly mangled fingers, the source of which is the product of a misspent youth that remains a mystery to Kasey until near the end of the events related within the novel. A very talented pianist (or “eigthy-eighter” in jazz parlance) in his youth playing Scott Joplin and other greats of the period ragtime genre, Ross was forced to take up the trombone, the only instrument he could play after this great tragedy of his life which gives rise to his sobriquet of “Boneman,” one of many colorful music-related nicknames of characters who populate the book. The long ago sordid incident did, however, instill within him a reflective wisdom, equanimity, and sense of empathy bred from experience, the lack of which as a young man had colored his entire life thereafter.
 
The band is amused at the audacity of this young woman whom they dub “White Bird,” both because of her apparent youthful hubris in thinking she could play well enough to join them and her equally apparent naivete that even if she could, it would be tenable for her to join a black band in an era when racism was not only endemic, but accepted as natural by blacks and whites alike. When Kasey smugly asks if any other applicant: “Can do the changes [improvisations] in ‘Ko-Ko’?” (a bebop or “bop” standard composed by genre legend Charlie Parker, Jr. (“Yardbird” or just “Bird”), Hite mockingly responds: “‘Do the changes’? Ain’t it somethin’ how dat white girl do talk jive?” before playfully adding: “What I mean is, the young lady is impressive in her ability to express herself in the appropriate vernacular.” The book is replete with such skillful dialogue tangentially addressing period stereotypical racial prejudices and nuances.
 
Although she inevitably fails the audition, Kasey remains persistent in her goal after receiving solace and encouragement from a sympathetic Ross, an older man who later becomes a mentor and even an uncle-like figure in the course of events. Unable to find a suitable replacement for the band’s recently departed alto saxophonist (which constitutes an intriguing backstory), in desperation Hite, through Ross, offers the job to Kasey, much to her delight but to the astonishment of others in the band who fear (a not unwarranted reaction as events turn out) racial repercussions as well as those in Kasey’s personal life, including Jack who, despite relatively enlightened views, bears vestiges of racial prejudices.
 
The remainder of the novel relates Kasey’s coming to terms with her now being able to pursue her dream and navigating the inevitable consequences of it while preparing for her first “gig” with her bandmates as well as peripheral matters such as a bitter labor strike at the town’s meatpacking plant which results in violence and death, an historical event lifted from real life in Waterloo. As she strives to fit in with her newfound companions, Kasey also discovers and experiences facets of black life and culture during this time period.
 
It is in this context that she encounters Sue, another racial renegade of the period, a hardboiled, chain-smoking white woman from a prejudiced family who had nevertheless married and divorced the brother of a band member and bore a mixed race daughter. A librarian and former school bus driver, she drives the band to their out-of-town gigs and serves as a source of solace to the young Kasey needing a sympathetic ear in the unorthodox situation which she has entered.
 
Most of all, Kasey’s relationship with Freddie blossoms into their becoming full-fledged confidants. She is horrified at Freddie’s revelations concerning the traumatic past in the Deep South of his longtime wife, a former prostitute whom he had patronized as a youth, with whom he has shared a tumultuous relationship with frequent separations; and finally, the story behind his mangled fingers. Aside from exploring racial prejudices and tensions of the period, the novel also explores the seemingly endemic and existentially menacing specter of heroin in the subculture of jazz musicians then, as well as undertones of homosexuality, a taboo topic even within the white community of the era and viewed as especially depraved by blacks.
 
As a side story, throughout the book Kasey is almost literally haunted by her patriotic, courageous older brother who died in North Africa in the war. Kenny had also been a gifted musician who had alone, save for their high school music teacher, encouraged his kid sister’s ambitions. Kasey has countless imaginary conversations with Kenny throughout the novel, though she is not mentally ill, fully realizing that she is the source of both her voice and his. She often finds refuge during her periods of stress and sorrow with such subterfuge of solace coming from such a revered and beloved figure from her recent past.
 
In the Blood is a tour de force that cries out to be translated into a feature film along the lines of Ray, the superlative movie based upon the life of musical legend Ray Charles. The music alone would serve as a tantalizing hook, but when combined with such a superb narrative would become fascinating viewing. I unreservedly recommend it as compelling period reading that explores a society of the not too distant past but seems so alien to many of us living today in a very different time nonetheless.
 
Donald Schneider, Midwest Review