'Last Night At The Blue Angel' Is An Emotionally Tumultuous Debut Novel

By Jaclyn Bauer in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 21, 2014 6:00PM

Rebecca Rotert’s breakthrough novel Last Night at the Blue Angel is the heart wrenching tale of two women: one struggling artist and single mother, and one overly mature, eleven-year-old daughter.

Living in Chicago in 1965, Naomi is a jazz singer at a hole in the wall club called the Blue Angel and lives with her daughter Sophia in a motel. Sophia, more the mother figure of the relationship, is a friendless, freckled ten-year-old who is constantly in fear of bombs being dropped and the world coming to end. She keeps a log of all the things she’ll need to reinvent once the bomb hits, as well as a running tally of the men and women that her mother has “loved” (i.e. slept with) and who have left both her and Naomi’s lives.

The only person who has remained a solid foundation for Naomi and Sophia is a freelance photographer named Jim. Jim, like so many others, is dazzled and in love with Naomi, though Naomi mostly toys with this fascination more than she reciprocates it. Jim is also a surrogate father to Sophia and one of the only comforts to her in the very distorted and adult world that she lives in. It is often Jim who shows Sophia the most love, usually more so than Naomi shows to Sophia.

The story is told from both the perspective of Sophia who narrates from the current year 1965, and Naomi who narrates from 1955. The stories are woven seamlessly together in a way that echo one another and reveal just enough to propel the reader into the other person’s narration with a new piece of information about the book’s characters, their pasts and their connections to one another. Rotert, a singer herself, has a musical pulse to her writing, and her knack for revealing mysteries that the reader didn’t even know existed is perhaps her most unique quality as a writer.

With issues of race, gender, sexuality, love, lust, feminism, child development and so much more, the novel goes beyond just the telling of a story: it encourages the reader to think outside the box of conventional thought and to consider life from multiple perspectives. Rotert is a writer with the ability to provoke thought, stir emotion and create characters so life-like you hardly need description to imagine them.