3/11/2023 0 Comments Opal and nev![]() ![]() Halfway through, a major revelation about the past shifts the narrative question to the present, brilliantly spotlighting how salient history remains in a country that has never fully reckoned with racism or held its perpetrators accountable. I worried that Sunny’s own arc, primarily focused on the challenges of being the first Black editor of Aural, a legacy music publication, might start to feel sidelined or extraneous, given that it appeared only in editorial notes between the chapters.I should have had faith: Walton structured this book masterfully. The first half of the book builds to a fuller account of the climactic event in the story’s past, and I wondered whether there would be enough narrative momentum left for the second half. At times, I held my breath, wondering if the novel could sustain its tightrope act - balancing its array of voices, its fictional history with actual history, its affection for Opal with the clarity of its portrait of her, its interest in Sunny herself with the story Sunny purportedly set out to tell. It is refreshing to read a book that centers a Black woman who has this many layers, a book that seeks neither to save her from nor punish her for the flaws that make her human. The fake-documentary format gives Virgil’s and Pearl’s voices room to shine and sometimes gently push back against Opal’s story of how she invented herself. Opal can be selfish, defensive and oblivious to what gets lost in pursuit of her own ambition or desire. Opal’s confidence is hard-won and triumphant, but it’s also connected to the messier things that make her a fascinating fictional character rather than a martyr. How wonderful it is to watch Walton build that complexity, starting with Opal’s fraught music industry debut. Walton brilliantly uses the unfolding story of the present to unspool the hidden story of the past. ![]() You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter or. He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock) A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press) and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton. Opal’s struggles are mirrored in Sunny’s work and the events that surround one final revival show for Opal and Nev, revealing that not much has changed in fifty years. Nev plays music that makes people comfortable, so he succeeds. Others define Opal in ways that limit her, even while she tries to challenge a variety of establishments. While Nev, a White British man, goes on to have a successful career after the event, Opal, a Black woman, never has a chance to do so. Walton uses this setup to raise questions about privilege surrounding race and gender. ![]() The book is a series of interviews with those surrounding the event, plus Sunny’s editor’s notes. Making matters more complicated, Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father. Everybody knows what happened to him, but nobody knows exactly how and why he died in a riot near the end of that performance. Sunny seeks to discover the details surrounding the death of her father, who was killed at the final concert of Opal and Nev, a fictional duo from the early 1970s. Dawnie Walton’s debut novel is a book by the main character Sunny Curtis, the first African-American female editor of a mythical, music magazine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |