The Celestial Jukebox is set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar. Shearer?s rural south is dependent on the rather less attractive fruits of capitalism, including agribusiness, gambling, and the dwindling vices surrounding the retail trades. The mood feels like a very humid melancholy. And into this weather comes Boubacar, a 15-year-old boy from Africa joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area — new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a small town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, straggling members of the original white families of the area, and unsorted other imports.

Boubacar visits The Celestial Grocery, the virtual city center presided over by a cranky second-generation Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox that often hoards its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson, when stuck on the same sad Louvin Brothers song. The tie that binds all these lives is American popular music, its origins and power. The purity and beauty of the writing — like the purity of the imagined soundtrack of more than 30 songs that exists within this story — marks The Celestial Jukebox as a rare book, filled with music, struggle, and spontaneous joy.

"A crotchety old Chinese-American man sweeps up brilliant pink blossoms as cats weave about his skinny legs, and dreams of a dance with a Honduran lady in white keds; a middle-aged farmer fights the onslaught of what passes for progress and examines what may be the end of his marriage; a young woman of color examines her past and seeks to capture the sad music of the Delta on film; a young Mauritanian man, freely come to Mississippi from Africa, finds both wonder and confusion in this loud, bright new land, as he longs after an old steel guitar in a pawn-shop window and falls further in love with the blues of the American kaffir. A no-longer-so-young mother fights her sense of invisibility in her family's life and is suddenly visible to someone forbidden. The damaged, fey Bebe Marie crafts her birdhouses of bottlecaps and fills her crumbling walls with images and poetry: 'This is the orchard of abandoned dreams.' Weaving it all together is music: the blues, jazz, the river of sound and emotion whose current flows worldwide, with unexpected effect. Shearer (The Wonder Book of the Air) has crafted a lyrical, floating world of an imagined Delta town that could not and does not exist, but perhaps should. Her touching characters and the beauty of her language overshadow any issue of pacing or self-conscious preciousness that threaten it, often rising to the level of prose poetry. A must for readers of modern serious fiction; a joy to the ear; a return to beauty in literature; it needs only a true spiritual dimension to achieve greatness." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"A crotchety old Chinese-American man sweeps up brilliant pink blossoms as cats weave about his skinny legs, and dreams of a dance with a Honduran lady in white keds; a middle-aged farmer fights the onslaught of what passes for progress and examines what may be the end of his marriage; a young woman of color examines her past and seeks to capture the sad music of the Delta on film; a young Mauritanian man, freely come to Mississippi from Africa, finds both wonder and confusion in this loud, bright new land, as he longs after an old steel guitar in a pawn-shop window and falls further in love with the blues of the American kaffir. A no-longer-so-young mother fights her sense of invisibility in her family's life and is suddenly visible to someone forbidden. The damaged, fey Bebe Marie crafts her birdhouses of bottlecaps and fills her crumbling walls with images and poetry: 'This is the orchard of abandoned dreams.' Weaving it all together is music: the blues, jazz, the river of sound and emotion whose current flows worldwide, with unexpected effect. Shearer (The Wonder Book of the Air) has crafted a lyrical, floating world of an imagined Delta town that could not and does not exist, but perhaps should. Her touching characters and the beauty of her language overshadow any issue of pacing or self-conscious preciousness that threaten it, often rising to the level of prose poetry. A must for readers of modern serious fiction; a joy to the ear; a return to beauty in literature; it needs only a true spiritual dimension to achieve greatness." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Shearer (The Wonder Book of Air, 1997) has created nothing less than a gem in this tale of intertwining destinies." Elizabeth Dickie, Booklist

"With memorable characters, writing that glows, and even an imagined soundtrack, Shearer's new novel represents the best in current literary fiction." Library Journal

"Perceptive and elegantly written, but the author describes a time and place more than she tells a story." Kirkus Reviews

Boubacar, a 15-year-old boy from Africa, moves to a rural Mississippi Delta town and soon visits The Celestial Grocery, the city center presided over by a cranky second-generation Chinese proprietor and his equally cranky jukebox. The tie that binds these lives is American popular music.