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Firstly this was a gritty and hard hitting scifi novel. It is complex and engaging. Cinnamon is one heck of a main character. I enjoyed this book very much

Absolutely gorgeous prose in this one. I had a good time following Cinnamon in the vividly-rendered post-apocalyptic world.

A stunning Afro-future allegory packed with hoodoo and tech that reads like Mad Max in Wonderland.

Chock full of African mythology and a word garden of techno slang and culture-speak, this dense piece of neo folklore takes speculative fiction on an even wilder ride. After a slightly muddled beginning, braving a whole new world and vocabulary, the pace picks up, hurtling you toward a heist-like conclusion. With heart and humor, the novel throws you into the deep end of a life fully lived and lessons yet to be learned.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tordotcom for my copy. These opinions are my own.

Different and I don’t think it’s going to be for everyone but it’ll work very well for the right readers. It’s very slow paced and takes its time tell the story of just a few days. It describes the life of those living in a slow apocalypse well and the tone of the writing suits the characters and setting. But a lot of science fiction tends to be Adventure! Action! So for readers that want that, this probably isn’t the book. But for a reader who is looking for something slower paced and more towards the literary end of the genre this is a solid choice and the four star rating is for that reader.

I see everything good in it but I do not have the energy for it right now, I thought as much as soon as I reread the description before opening it up. I think I'd probably enjoy it more as an audiobook, because I want to hear the beautiful words wash over me. But I do not have the brainpower for that much world-building right now.

I really wish I didn't have to rate books that are a little much for me right now (looking at you, too, Each of Us a Desert), so hey, it can have five stars. I just can't tell you what happened in it.

In most cases, I prefer to provide a brief synopsis of the book from my perspective without spoilers. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solid understanding of what is going on in the book to provide said synopsis. I will attempt to provide as much as I can. The story follows Cinnamon, the FMC who inherited a large piece of farmland after her elders passed. She hosts a festival on the property every year to celebrate art, music, and culture. Unfortunately, the prior year didn’t go as planned and this year Cinnamon is dreading the idea of hosting the festival again. Meanwhile, she also is attempting to help the near by city as much as she can in the dystopic future.

After 50 pages, this book doesn’t make any sense to me. The sentence structure feels off and the attempt to be unique causes so much confusion. Naming characters things like “game-boy” and creating location without much of any context isn’t helpful. I felt like I was dropped into the middle of a story. Maybe this book just isn’t for me but the synopsis was structured in such a way that is completely different than the book. I wish it wasn’t the case but, this was a dnf.

Andrea Hairston's new novel, Archangels of Funk (2024), is a science-fictional sequel to her two previous magical realism / alternative history novels, Redwood and Wildfire (2011) and Will Do Magic for Small Change (2016). The new novel's heroine, Cinnamon Jones, is now a sixty-year-old woman; those previous novels were about, respectively, Cinnamon's grandparents (a Black grandmother and a Seminole/Irish grandfather) who leave the deep South and come north to Chicago during the Great Migration of Black people in the first half of the twentieth century, and Cinnamon herself as a teenager in Pittsburgh in the 1980s.
This places Archangels of Funk as occurring in 2030 or so. This is only a few years beyond the actual present in which the book was published, and in which I am writing this note. But things have changed radically during those several years. We have gone through the Water Wars, which are not described in detail in the novel, but which evidently shook things up quite a bit. Large corporations and rich white people still own the world; but not everything is under their control. Cinnamon Jones is part of a thriving multiracial alternative community, including farming cooperatives and centered on the Ghost Mall, a former shopping center now refurbished as a collective gathering place and free kitchen, with lots of space for experimental collaborative projects. This community is hooked in to the global Internet, but it is largely a loose, local aggregation, autonomous from major centers of power and production, more or less self-sufficient in terms of food, and largely reliant on bicycles for transportation, instead of cars. This community is also relaxed and dispersed, resistant to the sort of centralization and totalization that one often finds in both utopian and dystopian visions.
Archangels of Funk is narrated in close third person through the varying perspectives of Cinnamon herself, her close friend Indigo, her dogs Bruja and Spook (both of whom seem to be able to grasp spoken human desires and suggestions, and the latter of whom is cyber-enhanced), and even her three "circus-bots". These sentient machines are camouflaged, when they are quiescent, as piles of junk; but when they awaken they take on robotic animal forms, and project vivid multimedia spectacles. They are also imprinted with the personalities of Cinnamon's grandparents and great-aunt. The circus-bots preserve and transmit the wisdom of the ancestors, but they also plunge forward in time in order to generate exuberant new configurations of spectacle.
Hairston is less concerned with narrative than with exploring the textures of everyday life in the changed circumstances of the world that the book presents. The novel is set in just one locality, western Massachusetts, where Hairston herself actually lives; and it takes place over the span of just a few days. Cinnamon is mostly concerned with staging her yearly extravaganza, the Next World Festival. This is a "community carnival-jam": a gigantic theatrical spectacle, highly participatory, played in an outdoor ampitheater, and filled with song and dance, as well as with seeemigly magical masks and costumes, together with splendiferous props and sets. Everything in the Festival both calls back to African American history and leap forward to envision social and personal transformations. A Mothership lands, recalling George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic. Careful planning serves for the proliferation of play, rather than for any more instrumental purpose.
Cinnamon is by no means anti-technology. But she is careful with her gadgets and inventions, because she is all too aware of how computational devices in the 21st century serve purposes of dissuasion and surveillance. Her house is configured as a Faraday cage, and she never carries or uses a cellphone. Her bots are always gather data, and anxious to give advice; but they are also booby-trapped to prevent corporate spies from seizing and reverse-engineering them. There is also considerable attention paid to physical safety. The surrounding woods are rife with robbers looking for a quick score, as well as with "nostalgia mlitias," dudes roaming about in combat gear trying to bring back the old days of MAGA values. But their efforts are somewhat hampered, fortunately; though they seem to have lots of guns, they are mostly empty because bullets, bombs, and other munitions seem to be quite scarce.
Cinnamon and her friends are not just happy-go-lucky creators, however. They suffer from depression, relationship problems, bouts of fake nostalgia, and other all too real psychological symptoms. The ill effects of global warming are everpresent: "deny climate change all you want, but when that brushfire rolls up on your ass, you run or burn". There are also kids whose parents are missing, visitors with murky and perhaps dangerous agendas, and so on. The novel is, at least in part, about how to negotiate such difficulties. It is psychologically incisive, even as it values lateral connections with others over the narcissism of deep interiority. Cinnamon is adamant that she is "too busy" to be "waiting for love," but she remains open to chance encounters and unexpected opportunities. People always seem to be engaging in
Archangels of Funk has no deep, mythical narrative, no grand, overarching Story: this is precisely because everything in the book is composed of little stories, told and experienced, involving exchanges and transformations on multiple levels. There is no firm line between actuality and dream, or between technology and magic. Hairston's prose style strikes me as unique, and it is ultimately what draws everything together. The writing is liquid and mercurial, stopping to capture unexpected details, passing between interior monologue and physical description, then turning and flowing away from what you thought was important, and drawing your attention somewhere else. When I finished reading Archangels of Funk the other night, I felt a bit confused because I was hoping for more. The final dialogue, between Cinammon, her bots, and some long-ago friends who have shown up long after she expected never to see them again, suggests a never-ending adventure. You may become tired of adventure and seek to rest for a while, but the energy will return, at least until you have passed (as all people and all things ultimately must). "You're a dream the ancestors had" -- which is true enough, except vice versa is true as well. "We're in a sacred loop"; there is no goal except continuing to play and to circulate. "Nobody makes up their own mind," because our minds like are bodies are continually in motion, continually intertwined with others. (Earlier, we had been told that "mind was always a community affair"). And: "here we are at the end of the world," Cinnamon finally says, "thinking up what the next world will be." And: "I am who we are together."

Alright, I read a few other reviews but I am DNF-inf this at 5%> My biggest piece of wisdom is read the first chapter. This writing style is simply not for everyone.

That said, the writing style is very unique and lyrical while being about a pretty complex science fiction environment. I simply could not compute all the details and poetry into understanding. My brain fought through every word. I think many people would find this exciting and beautiful. I really hope the people that it sings for, find it and love it. The themes and subject matter are compelling and I'm sorry I couldn't get my brain to the right frequency.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

DNF 13%.

It almost doesn't seem fair to write a review for this one - I think it just wasn't for me. I had a hard time paying attention, a hard time figuring out who and what was happening. The imagery and inner monologue were beautiful, but after two-ish weeks of forcing myself to read one more page, I admit defeat for the moment.

Perhaps I will pick it up again. Perhaps it will make sense after reading earlier books by this author.

2.5/5 rounded up to 3

This book is the sequel to Will Do Magic for Small Change. (Which would explain why I fell into it's grasp feeling as if I were in the middle of the story. I did not check for other books because sometimes authors just dump you in the middle of the story like that.) Since I haven't read the previous book or the prequel, which features Cinnamon's grandparents, most of this review is going to sound like this book is a stand alone. It is not.

Archangels of Funk is a combination of cyber and solar punk, with a huge wedge of voodoo mixed in. Our Protagonist is a woman named Cinnamon who lives out on a farm in the back of beyond during a slow-motion apocalypse and the ensuing collapse of society. Despite "nostalgia militias" and "desperados," and a nearby gated community with an electric fence and armed guards,Cinnamon's community is doing well for itself thanks in part to a combination of technology and hoodoo centered around Cinnamon's farm, and an annual festival that takes place near the farm.

This year though, Cinnamon's inspiration is lacking, the slow motion apocalypse is speeding up, and
desperados have kidnapped one of the robots Cinnamon uses in her performances. On top of that, people from Cinnamon's past are showing up, making problems and demands. It turns out that before she was a farmer and community organizer, Cinnamon was a hot shot cyber punk programmer who was fired from her job after her girlfriend stole her work. (Which Cinnamon promptly stole right back--along with their new puppy--before blasting off to the family farm.)

This is a fast paced book with the feel of a prose poem. Despite the fast pace, it is not a book I would advise reading quickly. The rhythm is quick, but the poetic aspects of the prose mean you might miss something if you read too fast. (This book took me a long while to finish, it was one of those books where you have go do something else in between pages or chapters while everything stews in the background.)

I was strongly reminded of Pat Murphy's The City, Not Long After and to a lesser extent, Emma Bull's Bone Dance. (The former due to the way Cinnamon's community is centered around the arts and education. The latter due to the use of African Diaspora spirituality, and the idea of preservation of the past and the arts.) I am at some point going to have to check out the other two books, Will Do Magic for Small Change and Redwood and Wildfire.

This review is based on a galley copy received from NetGalley.

Cinnamon is trying to keep her community going in a post-environmental apocalypse world. She has the ghosts of her ancestors to keep her company, as well as some amazing animal companions, but things are not all well. Trying to create space for a diverse community, and meet people's needs in an increasingly resource-impoverished world is a challenge.

Parts of this book drew me right in. The language is stunning and it flows musically, particularly when talking about the musical heritage Cinnamon has been given by her grandparents and their songs. I am a middle-aged woman who cycles as much as I can, and so I felt a real link to Cinnamon, and identified with her frustration with the state of her world.

This was, at times, hard to keep the flow going. There were a lot of different viewpoints happening and it was easy to get confused. I also struggled with the diverse use of pronouns here, as it took me a while to realize that was what was happening for one of the characters. Somehow I needed that connection to be drawn in a clearer way for me.

This is a beautiful book, but not an easy one to read. I struggled at times to pick up the flow of what was going on and re-situate myself in Cinnamon's space.
3.75 stars rounded to 4.
Thanks to Tor and NetGalley for the e-arc.

I enjoyed the overall feel of this novel, the cover was what drew me in and so glad I was able to read this. The characters were everything that I was looking for and thought the concept was wonderfully done. I enjoyed how well everything that I wanted and glad I was able to read this.

Archangels of Funk was an interesting concept. However, this style of writing is not one that I enjoyed, though I am sure that many others will enjoy it. The pacing jumps and feels abrupt in moments as points of view change. It leans more science fiction than fantasy (and I think I prefer the latter more), but the concept of the world was so interesting (and the undertones of the necessity of forgiveness and second chances was incredibly appealing).

While this is not in my wheelhouse of reading, I did finish it and would recommend it to my friends who shy away from a heavier fantasy read, but still want elements of magic mixed into their futuristic worlds.

I always appreciate trying unique stories because I get tired of the same tropey SFF. Unfortunately sometimes trying something unique leads to disappointment. I thought I would like this one but I found the actual narrative wasn't grabbing my attention. I didn't connect to the characters and so I didn't necessarily care what happened to them. I think this one has an audience but it's not me.

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

The writing style/voice didn’t work for me. I couldn’t tell if we were in third-person limited or omniscient. I stopped after the first chapter (2%). It’s certainly different, which I’m excited to see from that perspective. I couldn’t even guess how this would go over with audiences, so just leaving five stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the ARC