Crooked Hallelujahs / Kelli Jo Ford / 2020

Crooked Hallelujahs / Kelli Jo Ford / 2020

Crooked Hallelujahs will drip down your throat slow and hot as a whole bottle of whiskey. Kelli Jo Ford’s loving depictions of her characters may not make the challenges they face burn any less, but it does give the novel a heartrending pulse that will keep you invested in their lives. The novel follows three generations of Cherokee women in Oklahoma and other parts of rural America. Each character has suffered enough for an opera of their own. But amid the fights, heartbreaks, and attacks, the women find ways to tether themselves to one another and the future.

There are a couple of things the novel portrays exceptionally effectively:

1) Christianity - Lula, the grandmother in the family, fills the house with a haunted Holy Ghost. The poisoning aspects of conservative Christian culture choke her daughters with expectations of docile, submissiveness and repress their desires and dreams. It’s impossible to understand the history of the Americas without understanding the colonial violence of Christianity on indigenous communities. Crooked Hallelujah captures the ways this form of colonial violence still shapes and warps families. For me, at least, this portrayal helped make this violence less abstract and more concrete and real.

2) Rural life and class — Like the characters of Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown, the characters of Crooked Hallelujah are beleaguered by broken dreams: the lack of economic opportunities, failed romantic relationships, victimhood, and so forth. Hard work is a given in the novel and not romanticized.

3) Environmental Issues - Several moments in the novel highlight environmental issues faced in rural communities, especially the last chapter, where the effects of climate change are read as a literal apocalypse by Lula. For an altogether slow-paced (slow-paced is not the same as boring!) novel, it ends with an adrenaline pumping bang!

I recommend this book to anyone interested in multiple perspective storytelling, Native literature, feminist literature, and environmental literature.