Introduction

Joan's quest to find her sister following their mother's death sets off a whirlwood of events in Africa.  They reunited sisters join forces with the unlikely duo of Gordon Delacroix, Joan's former lover, and Jeremy Scott, a troubled English writer.  The days they spend together in the violence and bloodshed of a disintegrating nation change all four of them forever and force them to reevaluate what is meant by love, faith, and identity.

This compelling and unforgettable novel proves once again that Lucinda Roy is one of the most talented and original new voices in African-American fiction.

Joan Plum and Ursuline Shebar, the unlikely thirtysomething heroines of Lucinda Roy's The Hotel Alleluia, share little more than one parent. Reasonably happy in her West African convent, aspiring nun Ursuline doesn't even know she has a white half-sister until, stirred by their mother's death, Joan drops in from North Carolina with her bombshell revelation. Against a backdrop of brutal civil unrest, Roy, in her second novel, tells a story of both demoralizing adversity and taxing affections, all rimmed by two sisters' yearning for acceptance.

Helping span the nearly unbridgeable distance between the two is Gordon Delacroix, a black American who's worked as a Peace Corps director in Africa since before he and Joan broke up several years earlier. In uniting Joan and Ursula, he not only inadvertently embroils the former in a vicious game of political blackmail, but also arouses the latter's long-fallow, now fluctuating passions. While her sister languishes in prison, Ursuline considers the forbidden: "It would be a betrayal of her sister to love Gordon Delacroix, and exactly the kind of distraction she'd forsworn."

When, finally, the trio breaks for the United States, the women confront their myriad incompatibilities and the disheartening facts of a world more cruel and demanding than either had imagined. Roy's style is spare and straightforward--occasionally pedestrian--and she too often employs dialogue in place of solid detail; but the broad, dangerous, and sporadically tender world she describes seems ripe with redemption. --Ben Guterson

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