New Fiction by Regional Authors, August 2001 by Hal Jacobs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Time is running out for famous country singer Lark McCourry. Not only for her, but also for an old ballad that has been passed down in her family for the last seven generations. Lark's small plane has crashed deep in the North Carolina-Tennessee mountains while en route to her hometown. The pilot is dead, and she's pinned in the wreckage. When she speaks with a 911 operator on her cell phone, however, she has one unusual request: find someone in the area who remembers the song she only heard once as a child. She has a feeling that if the ballad lives, then so will she. As rescue parties comb the mountains in Sharyn McCrumb's The Songcatcher (Dutton, $24.95), the novel shifts back and forth over more than 250 years to show how the first McCourry came into possession of the ballad after being kidnapped and taken aboard an English ship at the age of 9. How succeeding generations keep the song alive, almost as if it's a musical virus in the family bloodline. Then how the song narrowly avoids being snatched up in 1916 by the Songcatcher, a professional musicologist who roams through the Appalachians collecting -- and stamping his copyright on -- old folk songs. McCrumb, who lives in Virginia and whose previous books have been named notable by The New York Times, perfectly captures the rhythms, magic and characters of whatever era she's describing. Her novel is a ballad in itself to the Appalachians and the history of the people who have settled it - and continue to arrive in droves. If the devils are in the details, Church Folk, by Michele Andrea Bowen (Warner Books, $21.95) is a devilish good time of a novel set in the Negro church community of the early 1960s. Reverend Theophilus Henry Simmons, "a big and pretty chocolate man," loves rib tip sandwiches and big-legged women. And when he comes across the best of both worlds in a slit-eyed cook at a Delta jook joint, he falls hard. From Atlanta to Memphis to Jackson, "Church Folk" struts and strolls with the rhythm of a B.B. King song through southern churches, black-owned restaurants and funeral homes. Bowen's debut novel loses a bit of tension when the action shifts away from Rev. Simmons and Essie Lane's passionate courtship. But there's so much soul, not to mention tight-clinging vintage dresses, that most readers will hang around waiting for an encore. Brenda Jernigan's debut novel, Every Good & Perfect Gift (Harmony Books, $23) describes a quiet, mystical kind of Southern religious experience also set in the early 1960's. At the Canaan Free Will Church in Cancan, NC, Maggie Davidson finds herself in the public eye after God guides her hand in a string of miraculous healings. After her story appears in the March 1960 issue of Life Magazine, the quiet girl becomes a reluctant celebrity as pilgrims beat a path to the rural community where she lives with her mother and grandmother. Maggie's faith and family values remain strong and untested, however, until a young Princeton student arrives to research his thesis on modern-day mystics. Jernigan offers a simple, yet honest, tale about a young woman coming of age in a community where faith, virtue and family values collide. It's also a community with few positive male role models. Even God, in this era before women's rights, is female. Julia Oliver's Music of Falling Water (John F. Blair, $21.95) is a dense novel of memories and multiple points-of-view that gradually pulls the reader into the dark mystery of a family tragedy. It is the fall of 1918, and three sisters have gathered for a weekend at their rural Alabama birthplace. They're here to settle old family business - and to learn that the bones recently found at the bottom of the grist mill are of their missing sister, Rhoda (the wild one), who disappeared 15 years earlier. Gradually, the sisters' memories weave a fuller understanding of what happened the day Rhoda went missing, though it may still take a dedicated reader to appreciate these upper-middle-class characters who talk like refugees from a Henry James's novel. After 8 years of marriage, Ave Marie MacChesney is saying all the wrong things to her husband in Adriana Trigiani's Big Cherry Holler (Random House, $24.95). Unless she "susses out" his needs fairly quickly and does something about it, Ave will probably lose him to a blonde Athletic Type. Although this domestic situation may seem dire, Trigiani's handles it in a style reminiscent of a Doris Day movie. "Big Cherry Holler" even includes an extended visit to Italy in which Doris, er, Ave, meets a handsome Rock Hudson type and becomes seriously distracted. Trigiani, who grew up in Virginia and is now a New York playwright/filmmaker, brings her TV writing experience to the forefront in writing about a delightful little mining town that you'll never find anywhere but on the big screen. An edited version of this appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, August 19, 2001 |
