Archangels of Funk
Cinnamon Jones • Book 2
by Andrea Hairston
Why You'll Love This
A post-apocalyptic world rebuilt through carnival, drum circles, and community — and the woman trying to hold it all together while falling apart.
- Great if you want: Afrofuturist worldbuilding where culture is survival infrastructure
- The experience: dense and layered — rewards slow, attentive reading over quick immersion
- The writing: Hairston blends vernacular rhythm, speculative politics, and folklore into distinctive prose
- Skip if: you haven't read book one — the world complexity compounds quickly
About This Book
In a future reshaped by Water Wars and flood displacement, Cinnamon Jones tends a fragile community of farmers, drifters, and dreamers while running a sci-fi carnival celebration that feels increasingly impossible to justify. She's exhausted, haunted by the elders she's lost, and tempted to let the whole thing fall apart—while outside forces grow more ruthless and the world her community has built together grows more precarious. Hairston understands that survival is never just physical; it's the fight to keep joy and culture and collective memory alive when everything conspires to extinguish them.
What makes this novel distinctive is Hairston's voice—dense, musical, and fully committed to its own rhythm. The prose blends Afrofuturist sensibility with the cadences of oral tradition, and the world-building rewards patient readers who lean into the accumulation of detail rather than racing for plot. The Circus-Bots, the Motor Fairies, the drum circles—these aren't decoration; they're argument, insisting that imagination and community are themselves forms of resistance. Readers who love fiction that takes both its politics and its poetry seriously will find this book has a lot to say.