Using bold narrative strategies, Keenan Norris gives us a first novel that is at once sympathetic and unsettling. Brother and the Dancer is a multi-layered story about urban modernity, class conflicts within the territory of ethnic histories, love's options, and existential rites of passage from childhood and youth into adulthood. Norris does not barter with platitudes. His writing demands a sophisticated use of cultural literacy to discern psychological and spiritual patterns that complicate the lives of American youths. Brother and the Dancer is a refreshing signal that fiction in the twenty-first century can still carry the weight of moral imperatives as it mediates chaotic aspects of our heritage. It is most rewarding to savor Norris's remarkable insights.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr., author of THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery
