An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Amy   

fiction

Roy, Celestial, and their mutual friend, Andre, take turns telling the tale of their relationship, marriage, and Roy’s incarceration on rape charges.  Roy was innocent but the system failed. An American Marriage shows how this injustice affected so many lives beyond Roy’s.

These characters interested me from the very beginning. By the time I was 2/3 of the way through the novel, I couldn’t put it down because I had to know how things would turn out. The novel was not told in strictly chronological order and I enjoyed the way Tayari Jones crafted the story. The characters were complex. The relationship between Roy and Celestial always seemed to have pitfalls despite their obvious mutual attraction.  The concepts of honesty and loyalty came into question throughout the telling.  Family history, upbringing, and choices also were assessed. 

I enjoyed that all characters were both good and bad.  I didn’t like any of them better or worse than the others—I simply saw them all as flawed and, sometimes, misguided. All were hopeful.  The novel highlighted the injustices of the court system and the prison system, particularly for African Americans.  But, mostly it’s a story about how people handle situations beyond their control when all their plans are thrown out the window. It felt real and genuine. It was eye-opening and also made me think. I also loved all of the Atlanta references.

There were two narrators in the audiobook—one male (Sean Crisden) and one female (Eisa Davis).  Most of the novel was read by Sean and he was spectacular.  He has a huge repertoire of voices and is a wonderful voice actor. I give him an A+.  Eisa did a fine job but Sean had the meatier parts of the story, from a narration perspective, and outshined her.  Due to the comparison, I’ll give her an A- when I might have otherwise given her an A.  I do have one complaint about the production. For some reason, Sean read all of the letters when it would have made SO much more sense for Eisa to read Celestial’s letters. Not sure why they did it that way but it could have been done better.