One the one hand, Orange Laughter it is a story of civil rights activism in the American south during a time when Black people were beginning to declare, I ain`t gonna take it no more. It is an underlying look at individuals who reach for simple but misunderstood things like love, friendship and family. In this volatile time, Laughter records the pastimes of an unlikely friendship between two little boys, one white the other Black. It is also the story of Agatha, the fiercely beautiful Black woman who becomes caregiver and nurturer to them both. By way of alternating chapters, it is also a contemporary parable of all-grown- up-now Tony`s decent into insanity and homelessness under the streets of New York. In Tony`s twisted reality, Agatha has been transformed into an evil and tormenting thing daring Tony to remember a past that he has chosen to forget.

Just to be fair, let me first reveal my prejudices. I who haven`t pledged allegiance to the United States flag since grade school became a bit of a patriot when I learned that the author of this Faulkner-like saga of love and hate in a racially divided South was a Londoner. A Londoner? How could a Londoner craft an American tale without words like bloody and shehd-jewell creeping in? While reading, I developed a petty pleasure scouting for misspelled words like realised, coloured or neighbour in the text. However, I soon realised that I was becoming the ugly part in that God don`t like ugly proverb so I silenced the fact checker and attempted to settle into Leone Ross` story.

Unfortunately I collided head on with the first of too many chapter written as the stream of consciousness ramblings of a mad man on paper perhaps in fact Ross` technique was too effective for in her effort to put her readers in the mind of Tony`s psychologically disturbed self I found myself longing for punctuation of any sort anything that would allow me pause heralded by some I found this annoying non stop prose made even more so by Tony`s rather irritating habit of accentuating every sixteenth sentence or so with dang or hey that rhymes or by spouting out clever references to popular culture by way of song lyrics this I suspect was Ross` way to prove that her character Tony was an authentic been there done that Black Noo-Yawker and so it continued like this page after page the only breaks were paragraph breaks but no periods no commas no dashes no quotes no exclamation points can you see where I`m going with this

Orange Laughter`s success is found in those chapters that focus on the past. The linear narrative and intriguing insight that color Ross`s prose in these chapters is coupled with personable and deeply human characters. However, because the reader is jilted into the jargon of raw mental illness at every other chapter, one can`t help but wonder when the tragedy that caused Tony to crack up will be revealed already.

The pre-civil rights movement in the south is ripe with unlimited gruesome possibilities and Ross does a fine job keeping the suspense tap on slow and steady while gradually leading up to the horrific events that irrevocably change Agatha, Mikey and Tony forever. Ross tells a good story in Orange Laughter, but she takes a maddeningly long time to get to the pulp beneath the peel.