Rainbow Rhapsody. This item is unavailable.Rainbow Rhapsody

Book by Borsten, Rick

Rhapsody Walker is a young black superstar singer with a Michael Jackson-like following, who comes to personify '60s-ish idealism in this emotional and multilayered story. Rhapsody is into his music and not much else until a life-threatening injury (sustained during one of his flamboyant performances) makes him reevaluate his materialism and the purpose to which he dedicates his talent. Guiding him, as they have since he was an infant, are his wise grandparents, Curtis and April, who raised Rhapsody on their orange grove in Florida. They are believable, memorable characters, but Rhapsody is less so. Though his evolving views on life, race relations and world peace are commendable, the evolution of his character from playboy musician to activist is too facile to be credible. His decision to write music with a "message," for example, seems to be rather one more episode in a thin plot than a true epiphany. An unusual and often refreshing story, Borsten's second novel is most notable, in the end, as a missed opportunity.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chock-full of grist for thought, this novel focuses on Rhapsody Walker, a black rock star grown weary of life. A near-fatal accident brings him face-to-face with death and provides occasion for him to review his past and alter his future. With a barely averted nuclear war as his cause, he founds the Coalition for the New Abolition to protest nuclear armament and plans a "Save the Rainbow" tour to promote his views. Rainbow Rhapsody is a novel of big ideas and sharp contrasts that may shock, overwhelm, or repulse. What begins as a fictionalized study of black family life in the 1970s becomes tract-like as the central character begins to develop an antiestablishment persona and act on his convictions. A select audience will understand and relate, but many readers will not get beyond the incongruities that the book presents.
- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.