Monday, October 3, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts., free, 7:00
Wednesday, October 5, BookCourt, 163 Court St. between Pacific & Dean Sts., free, 7:00
www.algonquinbooksblog.com
www.hillaryjordan.com
Brooklyn-based author Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound (Algonquin, 2009), about racial tension in a family on a Mississippi farm in the post-World War II south, was greeted with both honors and sales, winning the 2006 Bellwether Prize as well as a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association and becoming a favorite among reading groups. Two years later, Jordan returns with When She Woke (Algonquin, October 2011, $24.95), a novel set not in the past but the barely removed future, a dystopian America in which Christian fundamentalism, genetic manipulation, and the merging of church and state combine to solve the overcrowding in the penal system by “melachroming” convicted offenders, turning them red, blue, yellow, and green — bringing discrimination based on skin color to a whole new level. “She saw her hands first,” Jordan writes. “She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish. She’d known what to expect — she’d seen Reds many times before, of course, on the street and on the vid — but still, she wasn’t prepared for the sight of her own changed flesh. For the twenty-six years she’d been alive, her hands had been a honey-toned pink, deepening to golden brown in the summertime. Now, they were the color of newly shed blood.” Despite this science-fiction touch, the book hearkens back, quite consciously, to that 1850 classic of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as the trajectory of Jordan’s fallen woman protagonist, Hannah Payne, echoes that of Hester Prynne, both victims of a tortured “man of God” and overwhelming societal hypocrisy. Jordan’s echo of Hawthorne brings to light the Puritan narrative that still lies so close to the surface of an America that continues to struggle with sexuality, gender, crime, and punishment. Akin to and often compared with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jordan’s novel will hit stores October 11, and she’s opening her book tour in New York City this week with two special events, a reading, signing, and conversation with Valerie Martin on October 3 at McNally Jackson in the West Village and a reading, signing, and audience Q&A on October 5 at BookCourt in Cobble Hill.
