Rating: 
Summary: Right on the money!
Review: Frankie Silver is an ancestsor of mine. Charles Silver was by Grandmother's great uncle. We heard the tale of Frankie and Charlie throughout our childhood. My grandmother was Anna Silver who married Samuel Byrd. In fact, I am in the process of writing a screenplay about Frankie and Charlie!
Rating: 
Summary: In all her research, she lost the heart of the story.
Review: Sharyn McCrumb spent four years of her life researching this novel and, By Jimney, she's gonna let you know it! I understand her reasoning for droning on and on about the family networks; the legal system then was the Old Boy Network to the extreme. Got it. The first time. Why did she have to keep hammering the same old nail? And what was with the Fleming/Waightstill sypnosis? Oh, oh, I get it...the rich don't hang. Okay, got it. Can we move on now? I was supremely disappointed with this novel. I feel if she had stayed on one story or the other, Silver's or Harkryder's (And don't even get me started on that redherring Trail Murders thing. I hate being teased.), it would've made a more entertaining and meaningful story. And that is what was missing from this whole, long charade: the heart of the story. She broke a cardinal rule of storytelling: she told us a story but did not show.
Rating:
Summary: A complex story of class and culture bound in a mystery.
Review: A beautifully written story that can be viewed on more than one level, but doesn't have to be either. The author never forgets to entertain within the context of a story that is more about the fact that the poor go to the gallows more frequently than the rich than anything else. It is also about the place women have in the culture and how, in reality, that place hasn't changed much through the centuries.It is evocative of its location and its people as is the rest of the author's "ballad series," of which this is a part. What more can I say that I read it over a weekend and was disappointed only by the fact that there wasn't anything more to read. A real page turner.
Rating:
Summary: A good, suspenseful story with great characters.
Review: Sharyn McCrumbe's new book is The Ballad of Frankie Silver, the story of the first woman to be hanged in North Carolina. McCrumb's ballad books are based on the early English ballad. They have a sad tone and often tell of an historic event--star crossed lovers are a staple. Frankie Silver was hung in 1832 for the murder and subsequent dismemberment of her young husband, whose body parts were buried in three different graves, each marked with a blank headstone. Hanging Frankie is no easy job. She weighs less than 100 pounds, and the hangman has to practice to get it right. Modern readers will be horrified by the errors in the trial, the attitude of some of the lawyers, and the politicking which leaves Frankie as the sole defendant. Sound familiar? The carnival attitude at the public hanging is, of course, disgraceful. It reminds one of the behavior outside our prisons during executions. The Ballad of Frankie Silver owes a bit--quite a bit--to Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. Like Tey, McCrumb has a lawman, Spenser Arrowood, who has been injured on the job and spends his convalescence researching an old murder. ButMcCrumb adds two other murders to the plot. When Arrowood was a young deputy sheriff, he arrested and helped convict Fate Harkryder for the brutal murder of a young man and the rape and murder of a young woman on the Appalachian trail. Now Harkryder, after twenty years on death row, is going to be executed. Arrowood is invited to the execution. A third murder takes place in the present time. It is the double murder of a couple on the Appalachian trail. This murder is kept from Arrowood until late in the novel. I won't tell any more of the plot--I don't want to be attacked by crazed readers. As McCrumb herself has written, a book which started out as a simple mystery turned into a book about money and class and the law. McCrumb notes, "As I delved deeper into the story, I began to think that the case was really about poor people as defendants and rich peopl! e as officers of the court, about Celt versus English values in developing America, about mountain people versus the "flatlander's" in any culture." In fact, The Ballad of Frankie Silver is about equal justice under the law, and "not that much has changed since she [Frankie] went to her death...164 years ago." Sharyn McCrumb can tell a story. She pulls the reader into the minds of her characters, and she keeps the tension steady from beginning to end. The Ballad of Frankie Silver will keep your interest, and the puzzles increase from one page to another. This book is a keeper--I can't wait to read it again.
Rating:
Summary: BEST OF THE BALLADS THUS FAR!
Review: Once again, Sharyn McCrumb has outdone herself! With each book in "the Ballad Series," she pushes the boundaries of our knowledge and fine-tunes her wonderful skills in plot-development. _The Ballad of Frankie Silver_ has proven no exception! For those unfamiliar with this series (shame on you!), it will not matter. One of the many beauties of her work is that one need not necessarily have read the previous installments to completely comprehend the new one. I find it fascinating (as I always do), to lose myself between here-and-now and the bygone eras to which Ms. McCrumb leads her readers in each novel. The eerie part is coming to the realization that, for all the advances "we" have made, not much has changed at all. And neither have "we."
The two concurrent mysteries of _Frankie Silver_ serve to remind the reader of this very fact. With pain-staking details to 19th-Century American law, we see a woman tried in what would now seem an unjust system. We feel her frustrations. And those of us who know Appalachia can probably even relate to the scrutiny she must have faced in the "civilized" world of Morganton because of her own "savage" mountain background. As for Fate Harkryder, the central character of the "current" storyline... With capital punishment as hot a topic as it is, Ms. McCrumb poses some interesting moral questions in light of what we eventually learn about his case. And the meshing-together of the two storylines is, as always, the part for which I most admire this creative writer. So many differences, yet always the same! Sharyn McCrumb is "mountain magic" personified!
Rating:
Summary: Haunting,beatiful and mysterious
Review: An eighteen year old girl from the Tennessee hills, Frankie Silver was hung in 1832 for the killing of her husband, whose total body parts were never found. In the 1970's, in that same part of the country, Fate Harkryder is convicted of the heinous murders of a young couple. Two decades later, he is to be electrocuted for his crime. Twenty years ago, Spencer Arrowood, a young gung-ho law enforcement official, was positive that he arrested the right person for the murders. His then boss, Sheriff Nelson Miller, takes him to the Silver grave and confesses that there are two cases that he has had some doubts about: Silver and Harkryder. After recently being shot, Spencer wonders if he looked at the Harkryder investigation through myopic lens. He begins to investigate both the Silver and Harkryder cases to insure that an innocent man is not being sent to death. Appalachia is impervious to human time as it virtually ignores the mortal presence in its backyard. The timelessness of the region and the seemingly repetition of human events a century apart add up to a melancholy, haunting, but beautifully lyrical masterpiece from Sharyn McCrumb. THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE SILVER can be read on two levels. It is a brilliant mystery (actually two) and it is a fabulous philosophical work of art. The book is so well written, readers will subconsiously find themselves reconsidering how to look at the flow of time. Instead of just short term and linear as our existence seems to be, Ms. McCrumb eloquently argues, in her ingeniously blended pair of who-done-its, that time is vast and non-linear. This novel will pass the test of time and will be considered a classic in years to come. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Storytelling at its best
Review: "Frankie Silver" was the first McCrumb book I read and, like so many other reviewers, I was hooked. While I believe that all of her ballad books deserve five-star ratings, I can see how some people, especially younger readers, might not like them. I will not write a "book report." Instead I will offer ideas about why her stories do not appeal to certain readers: 1) Her exquisite storytelling ability is historically accurate. If the times are set in the early 1830's, she is not going to write in a contemporary style. She captures the dialogue of the era based on written documents of the time. Therefore, her dialogue sounds stilted or dry at times. 2) Ms. McCrumb is a baby boomer. One complaint was that the stories were about people in an older generation. Well, to that I suggest our young reader return to Harry Potter and wait for puberty to pass. McCrumb is a middle-aged adult who writes for adults.
3)When history is viewed as dry and boring, (I fault public school education for teaching history as a dry and boring subject) McCrumb's ballad books will also seem dry and boring. When history is viewed as the true tale of humanity, there is much to learn from her books. Or, to quote George Santayana: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." We do not know where we are going if we do not know where we have been. 4) McCrumb's ballad series have overall themes, in other words, a big picture. For example, in the "Ballad of Frankie Silver" the theme is the inequality of justice for poor people. She even explains the theme in the Author Notes at the end of the book. If one has trouble with big pictures, or synthesizing information, he or she will be disappointed with McCrumb's ballad series. And finally, 5) McCrumb's ballad series is written for thinkers. In the age of fast-paced computer technology, her ballad series books are slow by comparison. They reflect the pace of the times in which she writes.
The above reasons probably explain why a lot of people don't like her ballad series books, but they are exactly why I love them. I especially respect the fact that McCrumb writes for herself. She is true to her own voice and heritage and writes with honesty. She does not seem to have a need to write for false mass appeal to make a buck. She keeps her integrity as a writer and still manages to be on the Best Seller list. In other words, she hasn't sold out. I don't believe many popular authors can make the same claim.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring & Tedious
Review: A complete waste of time....I found reading this book
to be a laborious chore. Switching back & forth every
other chapter between the stories (& centuries) was
irritating. The author at times forgets common sense
in telling her tale.
This is the first book I have attempted to read by this
author. It will be the last!
Rating:
Summary: Boring & Tedious
Review: I have enjoyed many of Sharyn McCrumbs books, mostly on audio tape, but I read this one and it is an unusual mystery story, rich in implications regarding the death penalty. The subject is deftly handled so that the reader does not feel clubbed over the head, and the interwoven stories are developed with texture and depth of character (including the character of the region). I would suggest not only this book, but can safely recommend all of McCrumb's work. Thank you Sharyn.
Rating:
Summary: taken from something that really happened
Review: Anything by Sharyn McCrumb is great. She can tell a story within a story, bringing the past into relevance with the here and now. I went to see Sharyn when she spoke in Evansville. She passes her respect of Appalachia to her audience. In the Appalachia series you get the story behind the old ballad running alongside current events, both past and present come together in the final chapters.
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