Annotate With Sara

The color blue wends through the vignettes comprising Laura Warrell’s debut novel Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Shades of blue are one of many visual elements that tie the stories together.

Circus, the main character, is an aging jazz performer, known for playing women as expertly as he plays the trumpet. The problem is, he can’t perform love or music that will have a long legacy.

Although this story is about a womanizer, Circus doesn’t do all the telling. For the majority of the book, the women of Circus’s life have the microphone. The nuanced female perspectives are so refreshing in this type of story.

Wanting His Own Kind of Blue

Circus made me think of another trumpet player’s life and art: Miles Davis¹. In the public eye, these men make transcendently beautiful music. In private, they hurt the women they love.

They have something else in common. Circus, at 40, felt like he was running out of time to create his opus. He hadn’t recorded something with a legacy like Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album. But he really, really wanted that lucky break before it was too late.

Annotating Blue

Perhaps, with Kind of Blue in mind, I was primed to notice lots of blue details in the writing. Eyes. Clothes, Jewelry. Light. I decided to annotate the color to see where this detail led.

In previous books, I’ve gleaned these types of insights just from closely reading and annotating color:

• Color changes reveal growth in characters and places.
• Color can give thematic clues, directly linking scenes and moments that we are meant to look at side by side.
• Colors helps us understand underlying vibes, feelings, and moods.

Why I Think There’s Blue in Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm

Thematic Reason: Melancholy

Blue is sweet, soft, and plenty in Circus’s world—just like melancholy. Since blue is often associated with depressive emotions, creating a pattern of blue imagery feels like a deliberate artistic choice. Laura Warrell, painting with her words, emphasizes the melancholy theme with every blue brushstroke.

Poetic Reason: Music

Blues and jazz music are based on cyclical (repeating) music phrases. I like to think of Laura Warrell riffing with the color blue in this narrative that’s rich with music. Blue repeats in the book like a chord progression repeats in a jazz song.

Cultural Reason: Blue-Eyes and Eurocentric Beauty Standards

Koko, Circus’s daughter and a star of this book, is a biracial high schooler. Her features do not conform to white Eurocentric beauty standards, which are toxically celebrated at Koko’s (majority white) high school and on her mother’s side of the family.

Thematic Reason: Fire and Ice

There’s tension and discomfort communicated when characters feel hot and cold sensations at the same time. Cold tones, like blue, are included in these scenes.

The Complete List of Blue

You’ll need 27 blue tabs for this annotation project, plus a handful more if you want to annotate all the mentions of blue jeans (which I skipped over).

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1. Fun Fact: Circus is not based on Miles Davis. On October 11, 2023, on Instagram, Laura Warrell shared that Circus was inspired by Lee Morgan. She listened to his music while writing Circus’s chapters. ↩︎