Pushkin And The Queen Of Spades Pa

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Alice Randall gives us a character (and Windsor Armstrong is a great character), a situation, a pulse, a sense of the contradictions that life involves. The book isn't overwhelmed by the urgency to say something pithy, corrective and unequivocal. Better a fictional character's fumbling contradictions than unrealistic, arrogant or badly thought out answers. The story of Windsor Armstrong and Pushkin X humanizes the issues, and that in turn humanizes the reader.
— The Washington Post

Library Journal

Randall's controversial first novel, The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind from the African American perspective, established her as a writer able to use great literature to create new, racially charged narratives. The story line here is equally promising: Windsor, a Harvard-educated, Afro-Russian scholar, was raped at 18 and elected to keep her son, Pushkin, named after the Russian poet and playwright of mixed-race heritage. Pushkin, now a famous football player, is about to be married to a white Russian lap dancer. Disappointed and confused, Windsor goes over her life, trying to ascertain where she went wrong. Randall's narrator jumps back and forth in time, and long stretches of the story become confusing at best, boring at worst. A chapter-long poem near the book's end is simply embarrassing, and the finale seems tacked on. Despite its many flaws, this novel, read by Lisa Rene Pitts, has much to offer and several memorable moments. Recommended for most public libraries.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Black mother with a singular case of the blues. But Windsor Armstrong is not just any single mom: she's a Harvard-educated professor of Afro-Russian literature who got her doctorate from the University of London and has tenure at Vanderbilt University. Her only son is a star football player named Pushkin X (in case anyone doesn't know it, the great-grandfather of the Russian poet was black). Her Pushkin loves a lap-dancer named Tanya, a Russian emigre who is most definitely white. Windsor just can't help second-guessing her decisions: Should she have left her boy in someone else's care while she was getting a first-class education? And why does Pushkin have to ask a lot of nosey questions about who his daddy was? Can't he accept that Windsor was both his mama and his daddy and let it go at that? (No.) It's high time he understood his history-and in the process of bringing that understanding about, Windsor comes to terms with her own history. This includes, for no particular reason, an excruciatingly long doggerel poem: The Negro of Peter the Great, in which "Russia" is forced to rhyme with "the czar, would he cuss ya?" Randall, who ignited a brief media firestorm and legal battle when she dared reinvent Gone With the Wind from a black perspective as The Wind Done Gone (2001), founders in her second outing: literary references, cultural allusions, and snippets of black and white history are crammed into the narrative in a way that doesn't make much sense. The result: an intellectual's card game of 52-Pickup. Striking cover, scattershot prose. Not quite a novel, and not quite anything else either. Author tour