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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2018, 320 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2019, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Poornima Apte
Buy This Book
An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward - with hope and pain - into the future.
A 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.
Excerpt
An American Mariage
Dear Roy,
I'm writing this letter sitting at the kitchen table. I'm alone in a way that's more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn't possible. Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It's like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It's the same thing, but it's not the same at all. That's the best way that I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it's me, but I can't quite recognize myself.
Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been ...
Here are some of the comments posted about An American Marriage.
You can see the full discussion here.
Andre insists that he doesn't owe Roy an apology for the way his relationship with Celestial changed. Do you agree?
Andre had a thing for his next door neighbor Celestial but never followed through with it despite his mother's advice. Also, Celestial treated the relationship as brother/sister. In college, Roy asked Dre many times if there was more to the ... - bill
Do you feel that Andre is ultimately a better match for Celestial? If so, why?
They were friends and sometimes being a friend makes for a better relationship than love alone. - Beth350
Do you feel that Big Roy and Walter deserve equal credit for how Roy turned out? If not, which was the more important figure in his life and why?
I don't think the question should even be about equal credit. Big Roy adopted him and raised him as his own and he was the only one really waiting for him when he got out of prison. Walter looked after him in prison and they did maintain a ... - scottishrose
Do you feel that Celestial and Andre will be better at parenting than Celestial and Roy would have been? If so, why?
Well, it’s clear that Celestial does not want to marry again. Maybe she wants to be with a man that she loves, but at the same time, be independent as she always was. Maybe she fears that she can’t be a true wife. Andre respects her decision, but if ... - lilliantpr
Do you feel that Roy's response to Celestial when she asks if he would have waited for her is valid? Do you think he would have remained faithful if she had been the one in prison?
I don't think he would have remained faithful to her for even as long as she remained faithful to him. He was a bit of a playboy in his college years and I think he would have fallen back into old habits. - scottishrose
Women's Prize for Fiction
2019
All told, An American Marriage is a memorable dissection of one of society's most venerable institutions. Hard work or not, Jones brilliantly shows us just how easy it is for things to go awry in the blink of an eye, even in a happy marriage let alone in a less-than-perfect one...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Amy Bloom, author of Lucky Us
Tayari Jones is a great storyteller. An American Marriage holds the reader from first page to last, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters. Jones understands love and loss and writes with passion and precision about the forces that move us all from one to another. Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory
An American Marriage is a stunning, epic love story filled with breathtaking twists and turns, while bursting with realized and unrealized dreams. Skillfully crafted and beautifully written, An American Marriage is an exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable. Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow
Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear...with An American Marriage that vision, that strength, and that truth-telling voice have found a new level of artistry and power. Tom Perrotta, author of Mrs. Fletcher
An American Marriage asks hard questions about injustice and betrayal, and answers them with a heartbreaking and genuinely suspenseful love story in which nobody's wrong and everybody's wounded. Tayari Jones has written a complex and important novel about people trapped in a tragic situation, struggling to reconcile their responsibilities and desires.
In An American Marriage, Roy is wrongly accused of rape and receives a twelve-year sentence. His only crime, Jones writes, was to be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Indeed black men suffer on both counts: they are incarcerated more often than their white counterparts and receive longer sentences. According to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%.
African American men also receive longer sentences than their white counterparts. The sentencing aspect of the equation has come...
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