At age twenty, Molly Shakespeare knows a lot. She knows Descartes and Kant. She knows academia and Oxford. She knows that the people who love you leave you. She knows how to be alone.
But when Molly leaves England's grey skies behind to start a new life at the University of Alabama, she finds that she has a lot to learn — she didn't know a summer could be so hot, she didn't know students could be so intimidating, and she certainly didn't know just how much the folks of Alabama love their football.
When a chance encounter with notorious star quarterback, Romeo Prince, leaves her unable to think of anything but his chocolate-brown eyes, dirty-blond hair, and perfect physique, Molly soon realizes that her quiet, solitary life is about to dramatically change forever...
Mature New Adult novel — contains adult content, highly sexual situations, and mature topics. Suited for ages 18 and up.
Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players—some say the originator of jazz—who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.
In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel—one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness.
Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.