"It was as if an anvil had dropped on her. Her shoulders sagged, and Sausage saw, for the first time that day--after hours of handling the funeral ceremony, playing the puppeteer for her inept husband, arranging the flowers, calming the cousins, comforting the bereaved, distributing the programs, arranging the manner of service, greeting the people, dealing with the cops, the firemen, the parking, essentially doing her husband's job in a dying church, a church that, like many around them, was held up more and more by women like her--her deep,heartfelt sorrow. She bowed her head and covered her face with open palms, and as she did so her own pain unsealed his, and he swallowed, clearing his throat."
*Typing this with one hand while hugging the book with my other arm* This is not an exaggeration. I clutched this book to my chest after I finished and just stared at the wall for awhile. The ending of this novel hit me like a freight train emotionally (more on that in a second.)
This story begins when Sportcoat, the Deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church, walks out to the middle of the town square and shoots a well known drug dealer at close range. That is the basic bookflap summary, but to narrow Deacon King Kong's story to this one incident is too reductive. This book is about a community of people that feels dysfunctional from an outsider's perspective but once the characters of the community drag readers to the deep end, we see that this community is built on authentic love and radical acceptance of all people.
It took me nearly a month to complete this novel. It isn't particularly high in page count, but I found it hard to binge and I do think that was intentional on the author's part. This isn't something you can blaze through in a day without missing out on a whole lot of subtext. Reading Deacon King Kong took a lot of concentration. From the first sentence of the book, readers are submerged without hand holding into a community. The enjoyment of this book is held at the price of whether you can catch up and keep up with the history of these characters. Much like the dilapidated Cause House, these characters have been around long before you find yourself in the story. All of that to say, this is not a quick easy read, or at least it wasn't for me.
I thought Deacon King Kong was just a character driven book about a community and the majority of the book really is just that, but once I had about 100 pages left I started to see all of the behind the scenes work McBride put in to pull this ending off in such a spectacular way.
This read is a journey! You have to come into it with no expectations and a lot of concentration, but the ending makes it all come together beautifully. I already want to re-read it.
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