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"Characters burst into reality from The Hallelujah Side holding tambourines and Das Kapital and tubes of Tangerine Kiss lipstick in their hands. Rhoda Huffey depicts Roxanne Fish's struggle to grow up in her radically evangelical family with humor and see-through-you insight. Every reader will be rooting for Roxy to open her throat and sing her own unique soul in her amazing 'porkchop' voice." ~ Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife "Huffey's sensitive rendering of a religious youngster's matter-of-fact belief that the world may end any minute, moves her story from the paradoxical to the plausible." ~ Publisher's Weekly "This is a wonderful book -- it's wonderful! I loved the people and sympathized with their idealism, even their metaphysics. And the author's mastery of structural conjunctions in the story is a revelation." ~ Louis B Jones, author of Ordinary Money "This is the most pleasurable reading I've had for a long time, and the beginning sentence is one of the all-time best." ~ Oakley Hall, author of Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades If there were a National Book Award for Best First Sentence, Rhoda Huffey would surely be in the running with the opening line of The Hallelujah Side, the story of Roxanne Fish, a little girl growing up in the 1950s in Ames, Iowa in a Bible-quoting, tongues-speaking Pentecostal family that devoutly believes in the imminent return of Jesus Christ: It had been a Second Coming sky all day, which meant they might be in heaven by this evening. Roxanne's sister, Colleen, wishes Jesus would stay up in heaven where He belongs, and is certain she was born into the wrong family -- Colleen was sporting three new plastic rings from cereal, holding up all ten fingers. Her real family didn't live in Ames but in a larger city, and they went out to dinner regularly, once a week, and bought gum every day for the children to chew, Juicy Fruit in a yellow wrapper. --but Roxanne longs to be saved so that she can "go up" with her mother and father, Sister Zelda Fish and Pastor Winston Fish, when Jesus comes back. Unfortunately, she lives in a world filled with temptations: makeup, jewelry, and of course television. As Christians you didn't watch TV. Instead you played on the staircase, bumping down for hours on your rear end. Pastor Fish preached against TV as the one-eyed monster, but Brother Ransom needed it for crop news. Corn was going up and down like a yo-you. You got it all on The Farmer's Report. Then you turned it off, but sometimes Little Richard was too fast for you. And then there is the problem of boredom in church. Roxanne tried crossing her legs to get the Northern Lights between them. Staring straight ahead, she pressed. Her father went on about Habakkuk this and Habakkuk that. She stopped breathing. Then she gave up and uncrossed her legs. Leafing through the hymnal, she began adding "under the bed" to the titles. "Jesus, I Come, Under the Bed." "What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Under the Bed." "Rescue the Perishing, Under the Bed." That was a hysterical one! She was just trying to read the tithing admonitions on the offering envelope in Pig Latin, sounding out each word, Ithway Anksgivingthay, when something smashed her in the left side of her cranium. "ROXANNE IS A FILTHY SINNER!" said God. The Hallelujah Side is the unforgettable story of the
conflict between Roxy's desire to be saved and her yearning to experience
the beauty and variety of the world. The conflict comes to a head when
she discovers, with the help of Little Richard and a young Aretha Franklin,
that she has a gorgeous, fabulous voice. And her voice as narrator is
fabulous too, part Huck Finn, part Carson McCullers' Scout, yet all
her own in this exuberant and affecting novel.
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