Rating: 
Summary: Threads of History and Song
Review: This, my friends, is literature. A lot of the "important" writers taught in lit classes today wrote popular fiction--even detective fiction--in their day: Dickens, Scott, even Jane Austen; and I suspect that a century or so from now, when the likes of Fay Weldon and Philip Roth are forgotten, people will still be reading and enjoying writers like Terry Pratchett and Sharyn McCrumb. The latest entry in her Ballad Series, with titles drawn from traditional songs, has inspired me to write my first online review, even if I only gave it 4 stars--only because I like a couple of the other books better. I'd have given it 4 1/2 if I could have figured out how. This one is not, like the earlier ones, about murder, though a murder does make a brief appearance; it is about mysteries of time and heredity and the search for an elusive folk song. Nine-year-old Malcolm McCourry first heard "The Rowan Stave" in 1751 aboard the English ship which kidnapped him from his native Islay; after a career at sea and as a prosperous lawyer in New Jersey who fought in the Revolution, he took it with him when he moved west around the turn of the century when he moved west along the Wilderness Road and settled in western Carolina to found a new family. He also took along the family curse: that each McCourry firstborn would never come first with his or her parent; someone else would always come between. Lark McCourry, moderately famous folksinger, doesn't know about the curse, but is familiar with its result. Returning to Hamelin, Tennessee, to see her dying father and to trace the song she remembers hearing as a child, she is lost in the mountains when her small plane crashes. As Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and some of our old friends, and some enjoyable new ones, search for Lark, second-sighted Nora Bonesteel searches for the song. And of course, there are ghosts, literally and metaphorically, playing their part in the story. This is a novel about the persistence of character in family lines, about history and the making of the American--certainly the Appalachian--character, and about how a song survives and changes through history. McCrumb's great gift, even greater than her ability to tell riveting stories, is to create real, three--make that four--dimensional people, and a wonderful sense of place and time that makes the reader live in her books, hoping against hope that things will work out for people one cares deeply about. I like and own all McCrumb's books. She has two other series: the BIMBOS/ZOMBIES books about science fiction fandom, and the Elizabeth MacPherson series, all mysteries, and all good. But the Ballad Series is superb. IF EVER I RETURN, PRETTY PEGGY-O is still my favorite, because the reminiscences of high school are so painfully accurate reflections of my own experience. SHE WALKS THESE HILLS is the most haunting. But none of them should be missed, by mystery readers, fans of Appalachian regional stories, or anyone who loves a good book.
Rating:
Summary: A Family Made of Stories and Ballads
Review: Using her own family history as a springboard, Sharyn McCrumb has woven a fictitious ballad, an American geneaology, and the Appalachian landscape into an engaging novel telling one story after another, switching perspectives and historical periods effortlessly. She is a writer of considerable skill. An elderly man is dying and talking to guests who are not there; his daughter, a famous country singer, is on a quest for a song she recalls hearing once in her childhood. That song's journey is traced all the way from a pirate ship anchored off of Scotland to contemporary America. To some, we may be hearing from too many ancestors by novel's end, but the song itself speaks of change, and we watch how the song changes, along with the American nation where it has arrived, and every story matters.
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