Rhode Island Red

by Charlotte Carter

Overview

Nanette is doing OK playing her saxophone out on the street. Sure her boyfriend Walter doesn't think it's any way for a black woman with a Masters degree in French to carry on, but she's happy. Then things start happening. An undercover cop dies in her apartment. A strange man wants her to explain the mystery of Charlie Parker. Walter wants to get married. And who or what is Rhode Island Red? Fast, sweet and funny, Rhode Island Red is a classic New York thriller, the story of a Spike Lee heroine in a Woody Allen world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593314104
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

Liza Cody

"'Rhode Island Red' is elegaic and musical - especially if your prefer bebob to hip-hop. Lan is a wonderful character: a dreamer, head in the cloud, feet on the ceiling. Charlotte Carter has managed to be funky and dreamy at the same time."

Laurie Stone

"Lan, the narrator of 'Rhode Island Red', is so smart, jazzy, and gut-truthful, I would follow her anywhere..."

Lynne Tillman

"'Rhode Island Red' is a poet's invention, and her fabulous detectives, Nanette, a contemporary Nora Charles - black, single, smart, restless. 'Rhode Island Red' is an elegant, intelligent mystery, a pleasure to read."

Editorial Reviews

Style's the thing in this breezy, sexy mystery narrated by Nanette, a French-speaking, sax-playing street musician so charming and confident that she overshadows her own story. Having once more broken up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Walter, Nanette agrees to let another musician crash in her New York City apartment. When she wakes up during the night, she finds him lying on her floor with a knife sticking out of his throat and discovers that he was an undercover cop. Then she finds (and begins to spend) $60,000 in cash that had been stuffed into her saxophone. Soon, a mysterious stranger begins sending her yellow roses and begs her to teach him all she knows about Charlie Parker. It seems somewhat contrived that Nanette, as smart as she is ("I was one of those obnoxious child prodigies whose exploits are fillers for the Daily News"), fails to connect the dots between the men in her life, but her sardonic wit ("Two men do not a slut make. But, still and all, two ain't one") will help incredulous readers suspend their disbelief. The details about music and musicians are well-placed, and Nanette's down-and-out colleagues are an intriguing, believable bunch. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Ask any Negro. They'll tell you: a woman does not play a saxophone." That sentence begins this story narrated by the heroine Nanette. Nan, as she calls herself, is a young black woman with a master's degree in French who plays a saxophone on the streets of Manhattan. This she does even though she is barely making her rent, especially now that her live-in boyfriend has removed himself from the premises. But she is not alone for long. This naive but streetwise woman soon allows another street musician, seemingly a homeless and crazy stranger, to stay at her place for the night. The next morning she awakens to find him with an ice pick sticking out of his neck. And so the suspense begins... one would think. At this point, I did not care one way or the other about this wreckless woman and the foolish circumstances into which she gets herself. That is, until page seventy-nine piqued my interest. A foreign stranger for whom Nan gullibly fell a few days after the ice pick murder disappears without a trace. Nan determines that there is a link between her foreign lover, the ice pick murder, and the death of a blind, female street musician. The connection: the search for Rhode Island Red. For decades criminal types have been searching for this supposedly heroin-filled, gold-plugged saxophone worth over a million dollars. A mobster gave the sax to Charlie Parker as an incentive to play at his wedding. But soon after Bird received the horn, it was stolen or lost. So for this mythical sax, Nan unwittingly and voluntarily becomes the dupe, walking blindly and senselessly into danger, and allowing herself to be verbally and physically abused by an "angry-mean" undercover cop (named, contrarily, "Sweet"), a choice that, to this reader, makes Nan's mental faculties suspect. Nan's naivete and inconsistencies frustrated this mature reader. She is witty, but takes witless actions; self-reliant but dependent; intelligent but acts foolishly. Carter's first book has a theme (jazz) and poetic verse, but some important pieces seem to have been left on the cutting room floor. The uncomplicated writing might give the book a YA audience, but only those with an interest in jazz and mysteries are likely to stay with it. The gratuitous sex and vulgar language would further narrow the book's YA readership, VOYA Codes: 2Q 2P S (Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q, For the YA with a special interest in the subject, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).

VOYA - Faye Powell

I hope I'm around when Nanette, the saxophone-playing narrator of Charlotte Carter's jazzy first novel, "Rhode Island Red," is ready to tackle "Body and Soul." Even in her immaturity, this sassy heroine is something else. -- Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

Marilyn Stasio

Nanette knows better than to bring home Sig, a white guy who bad-mouths her street sax-playing. But she's on the outs again with her live-in Walter, and Sig seems harmless enough. Not so. Before morning Sig is killed, Nanette's getting pressed by a mean black cop who doesn't even know she's found $60,000 that Sig stuffed inside her sax, and Nanette, who's probably never even read The 39 Steps, finds herself on the trail of Rhode Island Red. She doesn't know what the phrase means, but just mentioning it gets her even deeper into trouble.

Nanette—a former spelling champ who went to Wellesley, listens to Erik Satie, and uses words like "hiatus"—is an unlikely heroine for this first novel, a gritty bit of soft-shoe. Still, she's its best selling point, since the search for Rhode Island Red, though sweet and sad, is also shapeless and unmysterious.

Kirkus Reviews