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Overview
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward community where he was born and raised. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his family. When the news of the gathering hurricane spreads—and when the levees give way and the floodwaters come—the fate of each family changes forever.
Synopsis
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives.
SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward community where he was born and raised. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his family. When the news of the gathering hurricane spreads—and when the levees give way and the floodwaters come—the fate of each family changes forever.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Tom Piazza has emerged as a leading eulogist for pre-Katrina New Orleans. After being displaced by the storm, he wrote Why New Orleans Matters, a bluesy wail that voiced both grief and outrage. In that book, which was published only months after the August 29, 2005, storm, he argued passionately for the city to be rebuilt. His novel City of Refuge further illuminates the brutality of Katrina and the monumental government failure to respond. Piazza follows two New Orleans families, beginning the week before the hurricane. In the early chapters, he establishes the baseline of home, family, and routine that is lavish with New Orleans detail. SJ Williams, a second-generation carpenter and Vietnam vet, his older sister, Lucy, and her son, Wesley, lifelong residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, enjoy a Sunday parade and SJ's fried chicken. Midwestern transplant Craig Donaldson, editor of the local alternative weekly, prepares a crawfish boil to celebrate his son Malcolm's birthday with his wife Alice, daughter Annie, and friends. Then comes the news of a storm in the Gulf. It is a measure of Piazza's artfulness that the familiar story unfolds with unrelenting suspense and a mounting sense of Katrina's human cost. Craig and family evacuate, expecting to be away a few days, and find themselves living for months with relatives in Illinois. SJ and Lucy stay put until the waters rise to the second floor. After paddling Lucy to safety, SJ rescues neighbors until he collapses. It is weeks before he, Lucy, and Wesley find each other again. Both families face hard decisions: To return and rebuild, or start over in exile? By focusing on individual choices people were forced to make moment by moment, day by day, City of Refuge becomes as powerful as the television images that kept us glued to the screen during those terrible August days. --Jane Ciabattari
Editorials
New Orleans Times-Picayune
"The big Katrina novel here at last, reconstructing a city’s stubborn spirit through a writer’s keen vision into singular human hearts. . . . Piazza strikes a blow for the recovery with this fine book, a perfect storm of love and anger."Jackson Free Press
"Richly detailed, delicately woven and compulsively readable. …an effective plea to appreciate and preserve a city and its way of life. …these neglected individuals and families will both inspire empathy and prevent tragedy in the future. Let’s hope that this is possible outside the realm of fiction."Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Though [its] stories are fictional, they may bring home the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in a way all those news reports could not."Washington Post
"Explaining this city’s inexorable, gravitational pull to outsiders who see only corruption, crime, poverty, and malarial weather is a tough order, but every page of Piazza’s deeply felt story explains a larger truth about why people live where they do: because it’s home, and heart."Baton Rouge Advocate
"Rich with New Orleans atmosphere and so believable. . . . It’s like living through the storm again.… as hard as it is for people here to read, it’s a book that finally explains what happened. . . . The rest of the country needs to read this novel."New York Post
"While the characters…are fictional and the events are real, Piazza makes it feel like it is the other way around. His heroes brim with life, while the city’s destruction feels otherworldly. …a tribute to what was, and how to go on from here."Gather.com
"Likely to become a classic of the future. . . . Its narrative voice is on a par with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. . . . An important book [that] anyone who cares about New Orleans should read."Booklist (starred review)
“In unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. . . . A story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself.”Houston Chronicle
"We’ve seen the broad outlines of this story on TV. But through Piazza’s pen, we feel—maybe fully for the first time—the surprise and horror as floodwaters sweep through neighborhoods, inching toward attics."Booklist
"In unforgettable scenes of biblical consequence, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the sweeping brutality of war. . . . A story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself."Kevin Allman
Craig and SJ, different as they are, have one thing in common: They're stuck in place, unable to move on from New Orleans, unable to move back. For them, Chicago and Houston are mental dislocations as much as physical ones. That feeling of rootlessness is the central theme of City of Refuge, and for anyone whose life has been upended by natural disaster, the novel's sense of being out of place will resonate just as loudly as it did in Why New Orleans Matters. Explaining this city's inexorable, gravitational pull to outsiders who see only corruption, crime, poverty and malarial weather is a tough order, but every page of Piazza's deeply felt story explains a larger truth about why people live where they do: because it's home, and heart.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
A passionate ode to the Big Easy's "cracked bowl," the latest from Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters) offers two alternating perspectives on Katrina and its aftermath. For Craig Donaldson-a white Michigan transplant who edits local culture organ Gumbo, who has a tidy house near Tulane University and whose two-child marriage appears "headed for divorce"-Katrina becomes a pressure valve for his own stifled emotions, as Craig rants about the "despicable" lies of George Bush, the "man-made" nature of the Katrina disaster, and his own marriage. Much more effective are sections that focus on SJ, a black Vietnam vet and widower from the Lower Ninth Ward, who is taking care of his invalid sister, Lucy, as the hurricane strikes. Craig's and SJ's approaches to evacuation couldn't differ more, and while their competing narratives occasionally illustrate the city's race and class divide a little too schematically, the point that thousands were left to rot is brought home with kinetic intensity. In stark contrast to Craig's bluster-and to some of the stereotypes handed to Lucy's character-SJ's methodical approach to the disaster and his ability to rebound from devastating loss speak volumes. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, setting off a catastrophe of flooding, panic, and death on a scale never before been seen in the United States. Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters) recaptures the devastation of that storm and its aftermath through the stories of two families-one black, one white-who are driven from their homes by floodwaters and spend days as evacuees in shelters and on the road, finally ending up in Houston and Chicago, where they try to piece together temporary lives while waiting to see what the future holds. Through the Donaldson and Williams families-their memories, their longings, their determination-Piazza paints a beautiful portrait of the Crescent City, as indefatigable in spirit as its citizens. This emotional novel reads like a memoir, teeming with fear, anger, pathos, hope, determination, and love. It is absolutely essential reading for every American who watched and prayed through those terrible days. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [This book was just picked for the One Book, One New Orleans program.-Ed.]
—Thomas L. Kilpatrick