Chip told us not to go out. Said, don't you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you.
The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.
Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero's fate was settled.
In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don't tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong ...
Although I really enjoyed this book, it left me with some unanswered questions at the end. It’s a story of friendship and survival, switching between Berlin and Paris at the start of WWII and Berlin and Poland in the early 1990s. The main characters are two African Americans, Sid and Chip, who are part of the German jazz scene in the 30s who find themselves caught up in the rise of Nazism. The outbreak of the war causes them to escape to France, along with a young German trumpet genius, Hiero, who is the ‘half-blood’ of the title. Although Sid and Chip are able to obtain the necessary papers to escape Europe, it is more difficult for Hiero to do the same. Some tough decisions have to be made and the ones that are may not necessarily be the best for everyone involved.
This is a great read and I enjoyed how the story unfolded slowly over the two eras it was set in, although there were things that were never fully revealed. The characters are real and the story moves along at a slow, but steady, pace. It took me a little while to get into it, but once I did it didn’t take me long to get through it.
