Rebel Yell: A Novel

by Alice Randall

In this gutsy novel from the bestselling author of The Wind Done Gone, a woman delves into her own past and her deceased ex-husband's private secrets to make sense of his unlikely transformation into a powerful black neo-con, and his even more unlikely end—at the Rebel Yell, a dinner theater of Confederate nostalgia. Rebel Yell is a novel of resilient love, political intrigue, and family secrets, steeped in our country's racial history and framing our unique political moment.

Genres: Fiction, African American

384 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2009

About the author

Alice Randall (born Detroit, Michigan) is an American author and songwriter. Randall grew up in Washington, D.C.. She attended Harvard University, where she earned an honors degree in English and American literature, before moving to Nashville in 1983 to become a country songwriter. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is married to attorney David Ewing.

Randall is the first African American woman to write a number one country hit. Over 20 of her songs have been recorded, including several top ten and top forty records; her songs have been performed by Trisha Yearwood and Mark O'Connor.

Randall is also a novelist, whose first novel The Wind Done Gone is a reinterpretation and parody of Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone is essentially the same story as Gone with the Wind, only told from the viewpoint of Scarlett O'Hara's half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave on Scarlett's plantation. The estate of Margaret Mitchell sued Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone was too similar to Gone with the Wind, thus infringing its copyright. The lawsuit was eventually settled, allowing The Wind Done Gone to be published. The novel became a New York Times bestseller.

Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, was named as one of The Washington Post's "Best fiction of 2004."

Reviews

[Tatesha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. It is really hard for me to tell all the things I have learned from this book after just finishing less than 4 minutes ago. There were so many unexpected twists and turns, mysteries solved and unsolved in this wonderful work of art by Ms. Randall that all I can say is please go pick up a copy and indulge in it.

It is not an easy read. There are many characters and references that you will need to keep track of, but it is all worth it in the end.

I loved living Abel and Hope's lives as the author takes us through their troubled life together and apart.

Vineyarders will treasure the mentions of Circuit Avenue, and the influence of the Black Upper Class in Oak Bluffs, and how Hope and Abel first met on The Flying Horses Carousel.

There are many treasures wrapped into the 364 pages of this book.

Enjoy!

[Kelley Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book as part of a first-reads giveaway. I really feel that if you receive a book in a giveaway, it's your job to read the book and write a review. If it wasn't for that, I would probably never have made it past the first 50 pages. As it was, I kept trying and trying to get through this book, and finally gave up about 175 pages in. For those of you who know me, it's extremely rare for me to not finish a book!

Part of the hard part for me was the culture and lifestyle that was described is very different from how I was raised. So I had a really hard time understanding some of the things that were discussed. For example, I had a hard time understanding why certain things were so insulting to some of the characters. Maybe if it was written in a way that I could see where they were coming from, it would have been interesting to learn about a culture different from mine. That's something that I would enjoy! Instead, the way that it was written was very confusing.

I also just kept waiting for there to be a real story, and I never found one! I know that it's about Abel Jr, or Abel III, not sure which. They called him by both, so who knows! He died and his ex-wife is thinking about his life. But beyond that, I couldn't find a story. The author just kept jumping from one thing to another, and from one time frame to another, with no real connections in-between. I never really felt like I was getting to know Abel in any way. I mean, yeah, I was hearing details of his life, but I never felt like I was getting to know him personally. Why did he do certain things? How did particular events effect him and make him the man he ended up becoming? I think that the author was trying to tell us those things, but I never felt them. I never felt like I knew Abel at all!

And the tidbits about some of the relationships were vague, odd, and sometimes disturbing. In the center is Abel's son Ajay. Ajay's step-father is having an affair. I keep getting a feeling that his mother hasn't been faithful either, even though at this point that's never actually stated. His step-mother is hitting on him. And his father seems to have been unfaithful to both of his wives, and possibly was gay. Good luck to this kid with those kinds of dysfunctional relationships as his examples!

I truly tried to get into this book and to find something good or interesting about it. Instead, I felt like it was a chore just to try to read another chapter. Unfortunatly, there are too many amazing books out there for me to read, to continue to waste my time on this one.

Check out my blog on www.kelleysbooks.blogspot.com

[Innerdiva1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful prose wrapped around an old story with a New Jack twist ... The Tragic Mulatto turned American spy. Although I love Randall's prose, this book rambled to the point of being painful. At the end, I was just determined to finish. If it had been edited "mo' betta," it might have made for a more enjoyable read.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Randall is an African American writer who has written two previous novels as well as many hit country songs. She lives in Nashville, where she teaches at Vanderbilt University. In other words, she has been living a full and interesting life.

I loved reading Rebel Yell. The writing is excellent, the characters are alive and leap off the page. Her theme is the many scars left on American people of color because of slavery, racism and their fight for freedom but her story is in no way a retelling of stories already told. It is as unique as human beings are unique. Stuff happens to people in their childhoods, those people do the best they can to understand the world around them, they make choices, they pursue goals and more stuff happens. If they are lucky, they figure out a few things before they die. That is life. The people in this story happen to be descendants of slavery.

Abel Jones Jr is the son of a civil rights lawyer who grew up in the days of black churches being bombed, children he knew being killed, Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated. He wants to join the white world. Hope was Abel's first wife, a mixed race woman with a white father and black mother, who was raised by her father in a world of privilege. She wants to fully join the black world. These two trajectories draw them together and of course it doesn't work.

After Abel dies, Hope reaches out to various people, trying to understand what happened to herself and to Abel. If she can grasp the complexities underlying their inability to stay together despite the deep love they had for each other, she can work out how to be a good mother to the son they created.

So it is a very contemporary story set in the South, New England and Washington DC. The war on terror, espionage and torture in modern prison camps lurk in the background like an ominous reprise to the life and times that produced these characters. The love story of Hope and Abel plays out its beginning in the wild times of the 1990s. There are characters, locations and social settings from deep inside Black culture that are unfamiliar to me, so I was aware that I wasn't totally getting all that Ms Randall was wanting to tell me. That made some passages rough going, though no different than reading books set in modern India, Pakistan, etc.

The tale shines through. I felt I was in the hands of a talent close to Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood, making me want to read more from this author. She has captured a part of the process Americans are going through because we have slavery in our past, racism is still alive and virulent in our present and there is a long road ahead of us in rectifying those evils.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am having a very hard time getting through this book. I was given the book by the publisher through a contest on Goodreads. I am going to read the complete book, but I am hoping that it gets better. I am ready to give my review on this free givaway from Goodreads. It is not worth the time it takes to read it. It is very jumbled up and does not follow a straight storyline. As you are reading it, you can easily forget what the story is about. Also, there is a book within a book, which I still have not figured out why. Supposedly, the main female in the book wrote this other story for her first husband and I can't understand why. Her husband asked her after she gave it to him if she was a lesbian?

The story is not well written, has many typos and leaves many facts in the air. I would not recommend it to anyone.

[J.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, what to say? I didn't care for the author's style; many times I felt she could've been better edited, or encouraged to explain more in the story. Overall I didn't feel the story really solved anything about what Hope knew of Abel's life, and it left more questions than anything else.

However, I did enjoy looking into the lives of black Americans who lived during the Civil Rights Movement. That was very interesting, and I think set an excellent backdrop to the story.

I'm not sure I'd read another by this same author -- there were too many things in her style that bothered me. But while this wasn't an excellent book, it did hold my interest to the end, and that's saying something.

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was ok but it went off an a tangent often and it lost me a few times. There was a spy understory that I'm not sure you ever got the full story on. There was a spy and the author just called him S_____ and I never figured out who he was. I think they told you in the last few pages but it didn't seem to add anything to the story that I saw. The book discussed issues that black people had to deal with in the South and that was interesting but after awhile it felt like we kept talking about the same issues over and over without saying anything new about them.

[Paul Blumer · Rating 1 out of 5]

First book I’ve put down in years. Overblown, overwritten, unearned scenes, xters, and impact. At the news of his estranged bio father’s death a 6’ tall young black man is reduced to blubbering tears so his stepfather carries him into the house til both of them are smeared with snot? Nah man.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the twists, the history and the dialogue in this book. I was surprised by how quickly I got drawn into it

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way vernacular wraps into a noose...

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hot mess. Confused and confusing. Did not finish.

[Diann Blakely]

A natural successor is to Michael Thomas's *Man Gone Down* is *Rebel Yell*, by Nashville’s Alice Randall, whose first novel, *The Wind Done Gone*, a parody of the Margaret Mitchell classic, landed Randall in court and in the pages of *People* magazine. With *Rebel Yell*, Randall jolts us into more contemporary territory, beginnning with Birmingham’s 16th St. Baptist Church bombings, whose foment and repercussions were documented with furious yet restrained precision by Spike Lee in *Four Little Girls*. Randall’s own take on the event is purely female, in the highest sense of that word: at what point do politics take precedence over the lives of one’s children? Like *Man Gone Down*, Randall’s book will open a vein in the consciences--if consciences have bodily systems and parts, and I believe they do--of Southerners in particular. My earlier bossy-boots mandate that that book “must be read” is not intended, by any means, to detract from the joyous ease of Randall’s own multi-layered narrative.

Technically, *Rebel Yell* is so far beyond the diaristic structure of *The Wind Done Gone* that it will take away the breath of readers of that first novel. Randall has gone from being a songwriter to début novelist to a creator of fiction fully in control of the complexities of her craft. Such control is learned by the writers one most admires, and here’s what Randall has to say about her influences and her aims, which she fulfills and then some, in *Rebel Yell*:


Would that more Southern writers, thinking back on their early days, wrote less about wisteria and iced tea and did more reading--the Graham Greene influence, albeit thoroughly assimilated, allows Randall to reach far beyond not only her native ground, but beyond the female body, though that body remains the holy ground from which the rest of the story springs.

(originally published on *Swampland*, Winter 2009-2010)

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to admit, I didn't really enjoy this book. It was about the life of Abel Jones, Jr. (or III, that was actually never clarified to me at least). He was an African-American civil rights attorney, married an African-American woman and then at some point had some sort of life crisis and became obsessed with being conservative and considered "white," he marries a white woman and works for a conservative government. Though, throughout the book it references he has been some sort of spy throughout his life. The book begins with his death and goes through his life through memories.

The book was way too long, by the end I was counting down the pages till I was done. I felt as though Randall could have made her point in less than the amount of pages it took her to. The book left way too many things confusing. Perhaps this was on purpose, either way, I didn't like it. I have no idea if the protagonist was Abel Jr. or Abel III, I have no idea what his actual career was, I have no idea what he did at Abu Ghraib (though I have a good idea), so the book was really just vague on things I think would have really contributed to the story.

There were way too many themes or morals of the story, and lastly, I just really had interest in the characters. Also, the writing would be narrative and then go into this artsy, vague type of almost poetry rather than prose. Often, it just didn't make sense to me and I just simply didn't think it applied.

I could tell that the author had a great idea and wanted to express a certain narrative about this families life, but just did it terribly. I really wanted to enjoy this book. If it had one redeeming factor it would be like it made me think about the concept of race in American society, and what that does to a person's conciseness, which I think is something extremely important to ruminate on. So that lesson was valuable and interesting. However, overall, I felt this book lacked a lot and given the chance, I doubt I'd read it again.

[Aurali · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.
Strengths:
1. The flashback portions when Abel was a child were interesting and telling about the man he was to become.
2. The country music loving, hard drinking, biracial protagonist was an interesting viewpoint.
Weaknesses:
1. The biggest weakness was the obtuse nature of much of the writing. I felt like writing to the author and saying "just spit it out already". For example, the sections discussing Barack Obama - just say his damn name! The way many of the sections were written was extremely confusing because of the intentional (I think) obtuseness.
2. I don't live in the South and am approximately 10 years younger than the main characters but the portrayals of the character's racial feelings felt dated to me. Maybe back in the mid-nineties sentiments like this were common, not so much now at least in the circles I live in.
3. It felt like the author did not know enough about the foreign countries the characters visited. Rome was well developed but the other areas should have been more deeply researched or left out because they felt extremely flat.

I had a pre-release version of the book won through a goodreads giveaway so I understand that editing still needs to happen. That being said, the missing words/misspellings etc made it impossible to even understand what was being said in some sections.

With some heavy editing and revision this book might be good, it is a long way from great.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rebel Yell opens with Abel Jones Jr. passing away after eating at the Rebel Yell restaurant. After his funeral his first wife Hope reexamines their life together and puts together the pieces to discover the true Abel that she never knew. Both Abel and Hope grapple with issues of race and racial identity and I really enjoyed that aspect of the story. I also liked how the author weaved real historical events throughout. However, some parts of the book were too cryptic for me and I felt like I wasn't understanding everything the author was trying to say.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rebel Yell: A Novel is the first book I've read by Alice Randall that did not take as its jumping off point another work of fiction. I applaud Ms. Randall for striking out on her own, but I found myself adrift in her prose without another author's work to ground me. While I was lost amidst her plot and her characters, I found her message far too heavy-handed. I could have done with more clarity in the former, and more subtlety in the latter.

[Helen Southall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written by an African-American female describing the life of her ex-husband following his death. The husband’s father was a civil rights leaders in the 1960’s – the young boy grew up attending rallies, etc with his father. The story is told through flashbacks of his work with his father and how it shaped his future. The book treats the conflicting issues of race, culture, geography, wealth vs poverty, and personal integrity vs ambition. While scholarly-written, it was a little ponderous.

[Paulette Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longing To Be Someone Else

Rebel Yell is a novel of self loathing and self discovery. How many times have people longed to be another person, and turn their back on their true self? I think that Hope was the strongest person in the book. She could have been the "tragic mulatto", but she defied those odds. Her ex-husband was an enigma who desired acceptance, but couldn't accept himself.

[Alice · Rating 2 out of 5]

After finishing the book I'm still confused about some key characters and story line. Maybe Randall intends to be ambiguous, but I found it hard to follow. However, there were some flashbacks in the novel that were vivid and memorable. I wanted more pieces of Abel's life story, but was left with too many holes. If I could give half stars, I would give this book two and a half.

[Pamela Larson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't really add this to my READ shelf because I could NOT get into this book. I tried several times and even later heard the author talk about it. It is very, very unusual for me to not "hang" with a book until the end no matter how challenging or poorly written it is. Unfortunately, this book was I simply did not want to invest any more time in.

[Glenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is a decent book somewhere in here. However, the passive tone to the narration sucks any urgency from the story. The peripheral characters are interesting and the central character is largely unlikeable. It was a quick read so I kept thinking that it would get better. It didn't.

[Sydney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting into this book. Right when I starting to understand who everyone was and what was going on there was a story shift. I don't feel like the characters were well developed and I had no desire to get to know them better.

[Flora · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was neat to be taken into an American subculture and hierarchy that I never really thought about. Also, her writing is generally lovely, but the subplots (and main plot!) were rather difficult to keep straight.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

above my weight class...while some of the vignettes were quite compelling, I was unable to piece the shattered narrative into a satisfying whole. "Literary" does not have to be synonymous with painful to read.

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not like this book. The only reason it got one star is because the premise was a good one, but the way in which it was delivered was in poor taste.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

so i won this book through goodreads and i must say i am enjoying this book already. i am only a few pages in but can't wait to read more when i get out fo work

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

One word. Brilliant.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting insights into understanding African Amerian perspectives.

[I Be Reading · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was extremely disappointing. The concept was incredibly awesome and I was excited to read it, but the writing was absolutely terrible. It wasn't even worth finishing.

[Jasmine]

Started off good but in the end the writing style turned out to be a but to much for me.