Christopher Hebert's epic saga begins tellingly with young college dropout Dobbs hitchhiking to Detroit from a Kansas truck stop where "no one would admit to being headed in his direction." This is 21st-century Detroit--hollowed out, burned down, boarded up--a city that "emptied faster than it could be filled." Angels of Detroit is the story of a ragtag group of young white activists trying to save the city with half-hearted street demonstrations, while living peacefully among those who stubbornly stayed in their emptied neighborhoods, attempting to rebuild them one step at a time.
Hebert (The Boiling Season) meticulously juggles a broad swath of urban characters in addition to the idealistic protestors, including Dobbs, reluctantly caught up in human trafficking through debt, and African American security guard Darius at HSI (the last multi-national manufacturer with a factory in the city). HSI top executive Ruth Hamilton is fighting her board to keep the local plant open. Hispanic woodworking craftsman Boni lives in his grandmother's old house, plotting to blow up abandoned buildings to call attention to urban blight. Cranky Constance, in her 70s, is trying to hold her family together and turn the empty lots around her into a cornucopia of vegetables. And Constance's precocious, wild great-granddaughter, Clementine, fearlessly navigates the city streets and alleys, picking up "treasures" and helping whoever needs it.
Ambitious, well-paced, observant--Angels of Detroit is a first-rate novel of flawed but admirable characters who want a brighter future in what one of them calls "the new Old West." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.