Uprising of Angels

I, Melachi ibn Amillar, being a man of wealth and taste, did read Marc Baldwin's novel "Uprising of Angels" (2011) in May 2012, since it deals with a topic of interest to me. It is the story of some residents of a ghetto area of Los Angeles involved in the 1992 riots. It is written in a modern narrative style, from the point of view of the characters, though in the third person, using the language they might have used, had they been inspired to write down what they were thinking, and thus some sentences are rather long, no doubt  to give the impression of immersion, a bit like this, but with simpler words. Sections dealing with one of the gangs are written in what I believe may be an African-American patois, and in the present tense. Sections dealing with the Koreans are in Korean. Despite this, it seems quite well-written and these artifices did not bother me too much. There is some bad language and violence, though not as explicit as you might expect. The plot is quite similar to a police action movie, though there are rather too many characters for it to be a screenplay. It doesn't seek to analyze the city or the riots in depth. I would perhaps have liked fewer characters looked at in more detail, as the book is not very long. Though you could argue that the people of that area are not very interesting anyway, or they would not be rioting. I did find the premise that a white family would move from La Jolla to South Central Los Angeles rather hard to believe. And one of the gang members has an ex-wife who says at one point "I am a full professor of literature at USC and Deacon at the Church" which seemed to stretch credulity. Some more detailed description of the environment would have been nice, and a map.  


How this compares to other action literature, I cannot say, for I do not read such literature. Whether the black dialogue and dialect-narrative is realistic I will not comment, for I do not know any such people, though it would be interesting to hear from them on this point. Whether the book would be admired by fans of the film "Crash", as is suggested on the back cover,  I do not know, because I have not seen this film. But I quite liked this book, and was joking about sections being in Korean.