Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

Overview

"A book that you want to share with everyone you know and one that you are desperate to keep in your own possession. A masterful debut and a new and thrilling voice for readers across the globe." —Sarah Jessica Parker, on Instagram

It’s 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and fifteen-year-old Justine grows up in a family of tough, complicated, and loyal women presided over by her mother, Lula, and Granny. After Justine’s father abandoned the family, Lula became a devout member of the Holiness Church – a community that Justine at times finds stifling and terrifying. But Justine does her best as a devoted daughter until an act of violence sends her on a different path forever.

Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman— and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. However, life in Texas isn’t easy, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River, we see their struggle to survive in a world—of unreliable men and near-Biblical natural forces, like wildfires and tornados—intent on stripping away their connections to one another and their very ideas of home.

In lush and empathic prose, Kelli Jo Ford depicts what this family of proud, stubborn, Cherokee women sacrifices for those they love, amid larger forces of history, religion, class, and culture. This is a big-hearted and ambitious novel of the powerful bonds between mothers and daughters by an exquisite and rare new talent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802149138
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/20/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	308,457
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award at Bread Loaf, a National Artist Fellowship by the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and a Dobie Paisano Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and the anthology Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, among other places.

Editorial Reviews

In her more than promising first novel…Kelli Jo Ford summons the details of minimum-wage life in the last quarter of the 20th century. She does this without cluttering her spare sentences, which is why her details resonate…This is a novel in stories, a dread form in the wrong hands. The point of view shifts, vertiginously, from one chapter to the next, as if you are watching a heist from multiple security cameras. But Crooked Hallelujah has a supple cohesiveness…As a writer, Ford is quietist. Her book reads like a series of acoustic songs recorded on a single microphone in a bare room with a carpet. There are times when you might wish for more boldness, but she never puts a wrong foot. This is a writer who carefully husbands her resources. Small scenes begin to glitter.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 04/06/2020

In Plimpton Prize–winner Ford’s gritty, elegant debut novel in stories, a young Cherokee woman tries to break a generational cycle of broken families while finding strength in an enduring bond with her mother. Ford opens with “Book of the Generations,” about Lula, whose husband abandoned her and her child, Justine. Justine, 15, rebels against her mother’s conservative Christianity by sneaking out one night to meet a boy. After Justine is raped by the boy, she becomes pregnant with Reney. Justine’s love for her daughter is all-encompassing (“I think it makes Mom proud to say I am—and always have been—perfect,” Reney later reflects) while Reney grows into a life that feels far from perfect. In “Hybrid Vigor,” she ends up working in a Dairy Queen in Bonita, Tex.; grieving several miscarriages; and in a dead-end marriage. When her physically abusive, unemployed husband leaves her pet mule to die, Reney takes it as the last straw. Later, Ford gives Reney opportunities to pursue a healthy relationship, an education, and a stronger understanding of the legacy of her family and heritage. Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Crooked Hallelujah

New York Times Editors' Choice

"Top 10 New Books" by the New York Times

An Indies Introduce

An Indie Next Pick & A Library Reads Pick

Named One of TIME Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020

Longlisted for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s 2020 First Novel Prize

Named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020 for fiction

“In her more than promising first novel, Crooked Hallelujah, Kelli Jo Ford summons the details of minimum-wage life in the last quarter of the 20th century….This is a novel in stories, a dread form in the wrong hands…But Crooked Hallelujah has a supple cohesiveness….[Ford’s] book reads like a series of acoustic songs recorded on a single microphone in a bare room with a carpet. There are times when you might wish for more boldness, but she never puts a wrong foot. This is a writer who carefully husbands her resources. Small scenes begin to glitter.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“Kelli Jo Ford takes her readers on a compelling journey through the evolving terrain of multiple generations of women… This language is rich but never dense. There’s a lightness to the perspective which shifts and bends, prismed by a matrilineal succession of Cherokee and mixed-race women… Ford’s connection to her characters shines through the writing, infusing these voices with a sweet, sidelong zing." —Washington Post

“[S]tunning and lovable… Ford has drawn characters who are earthy, honest and believable in how they resolve or reconcile to difficulties — money, jobs, relationships with men. There are so many passages in this book that are moving…” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[F]ull of poetry... Ford’s prose is so absorbing that you’re right there… [Her] pages ache with tenderness and love and no small amount of frustration… These stories stand up beautifully to rereading; they made me excited for what the writer will do next.” —San Francisco Chronicle

"Ford, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, offers a novel in short stories, allowing her to move with ease through perspectives, history and time. Each heartbreaking chapter slowly adds to the reader’s understanding of these women and their increasingly difficult lives." —TIME

"Kelli Jo Ford has penned an extraordinary debut set in 1974 in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma that is focused on mothers and daughters, the strength and sacrifices of women and the journey that growth requires." —Ms. Magazine

"Electrifying... A riveting and important read." —Booklist(starred review)

"[A] magnificent debut...Ford adroitly, affectingly weaves indigenous history into her spellbinding narrative, exposing displacement, unacknowledged violence, cultural erasure, relentless racism and socioeconomic disparity." —Shelf Awareness

"Ford’s storytelling is urgent, her characters achingly human and complex, and her language glittering and rugged. This is a stunner." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A book that you want to share with everyone you know and one that you are desperate to keep in your own possession. A masterful debut and a new and thrilling voice for readers across the globe." —Sarah Jessica Parker, on Instagram

“Strife between saints and sinners simmers in this richly drawn, atmospheric debut by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Justine, a mixed-blood teenager, rejects her evangelical upbringing for more earthly pleasures, risking biblical plagues to embark on a decades-long odyssey that will carry her and her daughter to the Texas oil fields. Ford unravels the stirring ties that bind Native American women across cultural and generational chasms.”—O, Oprah Magazine

“Engrossing and well-paced, this is a compelling story about women, mothers and daughters, the land, and family.” —"13 of the Most Anticipated Books by Indigenous Authors For the Second Half of 2020," Lit Hub

"Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah is more than just a really great title; it’s the book that’s going to be taught in creative writing programs for decades to come... What else can you say about a writer who won the prestigious Plimpton Prize and was published in the Paris Review right out of the gate? Nothing beyond "Take my money."—Buzzfeed

"Kelli Jo Ford's Crooked Hallelujah masterfully evokes loss and displacement, steeped in Native American culture, rife with compassion and deep understanding. Kelli Jo Ford is a powerful new Native American writer who writes beautifully with stunning prose! She is brilliant, and I can't wait for people to read her amazing book." —Brandon Hobson, 2018 National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking

"Crooked Hallelujah is an intricate, soulful look at three generations of Cherokee women pushed (in Philip Larkin's phrase) to the side of their own lives. At turns gripping and moving, Kelli Jo Ford's characters and the Oklahoma and Texas landscape take center stage in a truly modern drama. Ford sidesteps the easy tropes of spirituality and connection to nature and has created a modern masterpiece peopled with complex, fully-realized characters. A huge achievement." —David Treuer

“Startling close-ups of the sticky relationship between mothers and daughters, between body and nature, between childhood certainties and adult skepticism. Kelli Jo Ford's writing is heartfelt and brimming with talent. This is a stunning, awe-inspiring debut.”—Leila Aboulela

Praise for Kelli Jo Ford:

“Kelli Jo Ford’s writing is a high priority and will only gain in the world’s esteem...[her work] contains beauty and expected new intelligence.”—Richard Ford on Kelli Jo Ford's “Hybrid Vigor,” winner of the 2019 Plimpton Prize

From the Publisher

2020-07-29
An intergenerational story about mothers and daughters struggling to keep their family together in the midst of poverty, illness, and natural disasters in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Red River region of Texas.

Set against landscapes where oil being sucked out of the ground sounds like crying and men are swept into dust storms to disappear forever, the novel shifts primarily between the perspectives of Justine, who got pregnant at 15, and her daughter, Reney, who is torn between loyalty to her family and her aspirations to attend college and create a life of her own. Around this pair orbits a dynamic community of characters whose lives steer the family's destiny in both direct and subtle ways, including Justine’s mother, Lula, who's devoted to her Holiness church, and Jack, Reney's awkward but kind supervisor at the Dairy Queen, who envisions a better life for her. In lieu of numbered chapters, Ford organizes the novel into lyrically titled sections, including “Somewhere Listening for My Name” and “What Good Is an Ark to a Fish?” that illuminate the evolution of the characters from the 1970s to the near present. Some of the most dramatic subplots unfold within the lives of minor characters—such as a young neighbor who must defend his adopted family from a home break-in—and never fully resolve, which can feel dissatisfying. Overall, though, the dynamic relationships among the main characters carry the novel across these gaps. Ford’s prose glows brightest in the quiet moments among family members, such as when Reney and Justine free a trash bag full of fish into a lake and they "[shoot] off in every direction like fireworks," and in its reflections on the fraught, redemptive bonds between mothers and daughters that can feel like “a lost world...re-creating itself."

A tender and ambitious praise-song of a novel about a family's fight for survival, love, and home.

Kirkus Reviews