Trouble the Saints is an ambitious novel, but one that doesn’t quite reach all of its aspirations. While I was drawn in by the glittering, dangerous world, with its blend of unearthly magics and rich historical reality, as well as by the intriguingly complex characters, the meandering, uneven pace and confusing structure left me cold until the strong ending.

The book is divided into three parts, each from a different character’s perspective, each concerned with a different character's choices and destiny, though all follow the same story. We start with Phyllis LeBlanc, Phyllis Green, Pea, as she is variously known, a world-weary assassin with saint’s hands (the fantastical element that is left unexplained for large swaths of the book, tantalizing but unsatisfied until near the end) that give her supernatural dexterity with knives, a skill she puts to use as a mob boss’s “angel of justice.” In Pea’s part of the story, we meet the other two characters who will take up the storytelling mantle eventually, namely Dev, Pea’s half-Indian erstwhile lover whose magical hands give him the ability to trace threats of danger and violence to himself or others, and Tamara, a dancer with a penchant for fortune-telling and aspirations of being the next Josephine Baker. These three, along with a few other memorable characters, wind their narrative way through Manhattan’s violent underworld, the smaller-scale but no less violent politics of small town upstate New York, and the impending doom of America’s entrance into World War II. But the winding narrative doesn’t lay out a course as easily visible or predicable as that makes it sound, and the off-kilter pacing made it hard to get a grip on the story’s bones for far too long; for example, just as I thought I could see the direction things were taking, what I thought would be the major story line was abruptly resolved, only a quarter into the book. Pea’s narrative would have been more enjoyable if it hadn’t come first, but it’s spent too much in just trying to figure out what’s going on and where we’re going from here, leaving little chance to really get to know Phyllis, the lethal angel, who's been passing for white to work for a white mob.

It’s Dev’s turn next, and his section is the messiest of the three, with jumps in time that aren’t signified quite well enough, and a sometimes overly would-be poetic voice that was a bit off-putting. By the time we get to Tamara’s story, on the other hand (pardon the pun), we’ve seen her through Pea’s and Dev’s eyes, and that may be why her character and her story are the easiest to grasp and sink into. Tamara’s character feels the most wholly drawn, her struggles and flaws the most real, shot through with a thread of cohesive characterization that Pea and Dev seem to lack. By this time, too, the stylized language feels deliciously dreamy again, as it did in Pea’s first section but not so much in Dev’s; it feels like it serves a purpose, rather than being vaguely symbol-heavy just for its own sake. By the end of Tamara’s section, which is the end of the book, I felt like I’d finally gotten a hold of what Trouble the Saints really is, and what it’s trying to do, and was far more fond of it than I’d been for the first two thirds. The ending, finally, at last, really got me in its hooks, and felt genuinely earned, satisfyingly tragic, heartbreaking and enraging all at once.

Trouble the Saints is ultimately an uneven book, both in the range of quality between its three sections and in the literal pacing of the back-and-forth plotlines, but it’s one that still has a lot of strength in it. The world is captivating, the characters are complicated and sharply drawn, and some of the narrative’s turns of phrases are legitimately exquisite. Its supernatural approach to interracial violence and oppression is both original and fascinating, and gives the whole book an electrifying muscularity despite its slippery plotting and uneven structure. It’s one I’d recommend, albeit with reservations.