Trumpet (novel) - Literary Significance and Reception

Literary Significance and Reception

In an interview, Kay spoke about her desire to make her story read like music. Critics have acclaimed her for accomplishing this goal in a powerful and intricate narrative without melodrama. In an article for the Boston Phoenix, David Valdes Greenwood describes it as follows: "In the hands of a less graceful writer, Jackie Kay's Trumpet would have been a polemic about gender with a dollop of race thrown in for good measure. But Kay has taken the most tabloid topic possible and produced something at once more surprising and more subtle: a rumination on the nature of love and the endurance of a family." Time magazine calls it a "hypnotic story...about the walls between what is known and what is secret..Spare, haunting, dreamlike"; and the San Francisco Chronicle hails it "Splendid...Kay's imaginative leaps in story and language will remind some readers of a masterful jazz solo." Jackie Kay's Trumpet pushes aside the classic battles of race and politics, and opens up the touching exploration of identity on a level much deeper within the heart, in the end revealing "a broad landscape of sweet tolerance and familial love" (The New York Times Book Review).