The Ragtime Fool Book

It's 1951 in Sedalia, Missouri, and ragtime is making a comeback. When Brun Campbell, the old Ragtime Kid, learns of a journal kept by Scot Joplin, he hopes he can use it to convince Sedalia's movers and shakers to set up a ragtime museum. But plenty of other people also want that journal, including a historian who wants to publish it, an old friend of Joplin's who wants to suppress it, and two Klansmen who don't care if they have to kill someone to get it. What's one murder, compared to the Klansmen's grand plan to blow up the high school auditorium with its integrated audience during a ceremony honoring Joplin? In the middle of this imbroglio is Alan Chandler, a young pianist in love with ragtime. If Alan can stay alive, he may be able to prevent catastrophe and learn what it really means to be black in mid-twentieth-century America.

Publishers Weekly

American obsessions with race and glory dominate Karp’s lively conclusion, set in 1951, to his Ragtime trilogy (after 2008’s The King of Ragtime). Decades earlier, Brun Campbell was ragtime genius Scott Joplin’s only white pupil. Now an elderly barber in Venice, Calif., Brun frantically publicizes Joplin, ragtime, and himself. In Hobart, N.J., Alan Chandler, a 17-year-old piano student, has fallen in love with ragtime music. Both Brun and Alan are excited to hear that a journal Joplin kept may soon be published. In Sedalia, Mo., Joplin’s home for many years, diehard Klansmen are plotting to bomb an interracial ceremony honoring the composer. Brun and Alan race to Sedalia, where they find themselves caught in a confused swirl of various characters who want to steal the valuable journal—or stop its publication. Karp handles the intricate plot well, but the best part of the book is its picture of people torn between what they want to forget and what they need to remember. (Apr.)