<DIV>Set in the invented Mississippi Delta town of Madagascar, Cynthia Shearer's <i>The Celestial Jukebox</i> depicts a rural South dependent on agribusiness and the fruits of some less attractive forms of capitalism--gambling and other vices. Into this world comes Boubacar, a fifteen-year-old African boy joining friends from Mauritania already living in the area. They are new African blacks not especially noteworthy in a town filled with Chinese emigrants, African Americans within memory of slavery, and straggling members of the original white families of the area. Presiding over Madagascar is Angus, the second-generation Delta Chinese proprietor of the Celestial Grocery, and his vintage jukebox with its treasure of Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, and Wanda Jackson songs.<p>The ties that bind the lives in this community together are American roots music and the desire to make a home in the rural South. The purity and beauty of Cynthia Shearer's writing--like the purity of music that exists within this story, an imagined soundtrack of more than thirty songs--marks <i>The Celestial Jukebox</i> as that most rare book, a novel as historically expansive as it is intimate, filled with music, wisdom, and spontaneous joy.</DIV>