Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Published:
  • Jul 2020, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson's timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to change her fate at the dawn of World War II.

Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she's hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.

Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything―not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams.

Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side―and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it's too late―is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?

Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel―a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines―and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"In musical prose, [Johnson] offers passionate and painful depictions of the love expressed in romance and friendship and the sacrifices such love can demand. A sad, lovely, and blood-soaked song of a book." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"With a sweeping but overstuffed plot, dynamic characters, and style to spare, this alternate history demands the reader's full attention. Fans of challenging, diverse fantasy will enjoy this literary firecracker." - Publishers Weekly

"Juju assassins, alternate history, a gritty New York crime story... in a word: awesome" - N.K. Jemisin, New York Times bestselling author of The Fifth Season

"Beware this magnificent beguilement of a novel: once begun, Alaya Dawn Johnson's Trouble the Saints won't let you go." - Kelly Link, New York Times bestselling author of Get In Trouble

This information about Trouble the Saints was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alaya Dawn Johnson has been recognized for her short fiction and YA novels, winning the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i," which also appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015), guest edited by Joe Hill. Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Her follow up YA novel, Love Is the Drug, won the Andre Norton Award in 2015. A native of Washington, D.C., Johnson is currently based in Mexico City, where she received a masters degree in Mesoamerican studies and sings in a blues band.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more fantasy, sci-fi, speculative, alt. history...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Tell Me Everything
    Tell Me Everything
    by Elizabeth Strout
    Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything picks up where her previous book Lucy by the Sea (2022) left ...
  • Book Jacket: The God of the Woods
    The God of the Woods
    by Liz Moore
    Bestselling author Liz Moore's latest novel, The God of the Woods, begins with a disappearance. ...
  • Book Jacket: Becoming Madam Secretary
    Becoming Madam Secretary
    by Stephanie Dray
    Our First Impressions reviewers enjoyed reading about Frances Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ...
  • Book Jacket: Everything We Never Had
    Everything We Never Had
    by Randy Ribay
    Francisco Maghabol has recently arrived in California from the Philippines, eager to earn money to ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Memory Library
by Kate Storey
Journey through the pages of this heartwarming novel, where hope, friendship and second chances are written in the margins.
Book Club Giveaway!
Win My Darling Boy

My Darling Boy by John Dufresne

The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.

Enter

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D T the B O W the B

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.