38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range. Quick Book Summary (from the official blurb): “In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a. James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, recent winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in fiction, is our next selection. Sportcoat is, among many things, a brilliant, self-made botanist the teen is a gifted baseball pitcher.In a continuation of our series of micro-reviews, assistant editor Brandon Williams brought together a group of ardent readers to give their quick-hit impressions of recent novels which have won major awards from the literary world. McBride can turn what first appear to be stereotypes - the church deacon who is an amiable drunk, the teen-age drug dealer poisoning his own neighborhood - into vivid, three-dimensional characters with engrossing life stories. (McBride is giving a fictional twist to the real Venus of Willendorf, which is in a museum in Austria.) This hidden gem becomes an alluring element of high art in a story that mostly features folks on the lower fringes of society.

McBride includes an element of serious mystery - the whereabouts of the Venus of Willendorf, an enormously valuable figurine dating back many thousands of years. Deacon King Kong is the second nickname that locals gave Sportcoat due to his constant drinking of a homemade booze known as King Kong. The narrative flows seamlessly from buoyant and comical black jive to somber, pitch-perfect descriptives of the histories and hard lives of those doing the talking, many with nicknames: Hot Sausage, the Elephant, Lightbulb. But, significantly, it offers its inhabitants a view of the Statue of Liberty. Once dominated by newly arrived Italians, it now struggles with a racial and economic mix. It is also a witty sociological study of a waterfront Brooklyn community dotted with crummy apartments in high-rise housing projects - poor but lively, with derelict docks where crime and commerce mix.

With Sportcoat and Hettie, who arrived at the Cause Houses neighborhood in 1945 as part of the great migration of Southern blacks, the novel becomes a moving love story. He is a bit Hamlet-like, talking to the ghost of his wife, Hettie, a beloved member of his church who was found dead in harbor waters two years before the shooting. With Sportcoat, a 71-year-old deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church, McBride has created a flawed but compelling and even heroic central figure.

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