Soul City

I didn't know what to expect when I read this book and I enjoyed it very much. This fantasy city was live, and the characters were colorful and memorable. The story was magical. Definitely a book that veers from the rest and got me so caught up that I didn't want to leave Soul City. The ending was enjoyable. If you're into fantasy type reads and think you'd enjoy an adult, African American fairy tale, I'd highly recommend this read.

After reading 2 chapters, one line from a song kept running through my mind - "one Nation under a Groove". This book is marvelous. I enjoyed every character and there are plenty of those. The setting, the premise, are just all about black folks and all that's good and bad about us just made funky. I couldn't put it down, I had never heard of it and I consider myself to be a "connoisseur" of books. I'm going to tell all my friends about it. It's a must read and I don't say that about a lot of books. TOURE - YOU GET MAJOR PROPS FROM ME. Keep putting them out, they will get read...

Soul City is a perfect book for a lazy afternoon. It allows you to forget about your reality and delve into a world where music governs, the mayor is a DJ and Death is a character that's not scary. Toure is a talented writer with a keen sense of humor, and a sharp eye for detail. That's what makes Soul City a fantastical read. Even the pop culture references he makes are filled with amazing truths. Toure though sometimes gets caught up with the superficial. His best writing emerges when he digs deep and gives us a bit of his soul. It's those precious nuggets of soul, that make me rate this 5 stars but he's got to show us more of it. He's proven he can deliver humor, but ultimately it's the insight and soul that's more interesting. I'm looking forward to more of his fiction. I'm hoping he'll open up and give us more depth. Cheers to this young writer and his journey.

SOUL CITY by Touré September 10, 2004 I wasn't familiar with Touré or who he is, so I read this book with a complete blank slate, not knowing what to expect. I was in for a treat! It's a story filled with outrageous characters and caricatures of people living in a town called SOUL CITY. The residents can fly, they eat magic muffins, and living several hundred years is not uncommon. A man named Cadillac Jackson travels to Soul City to cover the mayoral election. However, Cadillac has the hardest time writing down anything, because what he sees and learns in Soul City is so hard to describe. He finds himself meeting the various residents, and through him the reader gets to meet the many larger-than-life characters that grace these pages. The gist of this book is African American pride and a sense of history of where they have been, and where they are now. But in between all that the reader gets to walk down memory lane through a sea of pop culture that will have one laughing and smiling. It's a very short book, only 184 pages, but it could have easily been longer. I didn't want the book to end, but although it was only 184 pages, I think Toure did a good job at telling a fable about racism, about accepting others for their differences, and for appreciating one's roots and celebrating all that has come before. This book will definitely be on my top 20 list for 2004.

The first few pages of Toure's masterful new novel took me back to the first time I saw a Spike Lee movie (School Daze, 1988). It was a well-crafted, perfectly-told inside joke and I was on the inside. Like Spike Lee, Toure's world-view is not only unquestionably Black but based in the time before Blackness was so often equated with nihilistic despair. Soul City snatched me out of my own hectic life which involves too many frequent-flyer miles and too few homemade biscuits and plopped me down in Toure's utopian vision. Interestingly, once I arrived, I had the feeling of returning to a place I had once loved but had not visited in a long time. The best literature forces you to reexamine your life. Soul City makes me want to turn my car into a RobertaFlackmobile, crank up the volume and dance on the hood with a well-shaped Black woman until a 350-year-old grandmother tells us to " Git the ---- down from there." Toure celebrates Black culture the way I wish more of us did and arms me with renewed strength to withstand the onslaught of the diamond-studded minstrels who are turning our people into a cartoon. I bought Soul City and Jill Scott's new CD at the same time and finished Soul City before I even removed the plastic from the CD. From me, there can be no higher praise. Buy two copies of this book. The first is to read and reread until it is a worn as my first copy of the Portable Promised Land. Wrap the second copy in cellophane to keep as a family heirloom which your great-grandchildren can discover someday and learn why despite the drama and the hardships, African-Americans live with such joy.