Appalachian tale samples music, magic
1. Joyland by Stephen King (Hard Case Crime). In North Carolina in 1973, a college student working at an amusement park confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever. 2. World War Z by Max Brooks ( Three Rivers, $14.95). An “oral history” of an imagined Zombie War. 3. Entwined With You by Sylvia Day (Berkley). Eve and Gideon face the demons of their pasts and accept the consequences of their obsessive desires; a Crossfire novel. 4. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (Harper Perennial, $15.99). Ruins both emotional and architectural, in Italy, Hollywood and elsewhere, figure in this sweeping novel. 5. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial). A woman’s life expands as a visitation of butterflies brings scientific truths to rural Tennessee. 6. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (HarperOne). In this fable, a Spanish shepherd boy ventures to Egypt in search of treasure and his destiny.
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7. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James (Vintage, $15.95). First book in an erotic trilogy. 8. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (Bantam). In the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are mustering; Book 1 of “A Song of Ice and Fire.” 9. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $14 and $15.95). An allegory on the high seas, in which a teenage boy and a 450-pound tiger are thrown together in a lifeboat after a shipwreck. 10. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (Back Bay/ Little, Brown). A teenage daughter compiles emails, official documents and secret correspondence in an effort to find her eccentric mother. 1. Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander (Simon & Schuster, $15.99). A neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife. 2. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99). Why some people succeed.
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3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Scribner). The author recalls a bizarre childhood during which she was constantly on the move. 4. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Broadway, $16). The story of an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were extensively cultured without her permission in 1951. 5. Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Vintage, $15.95). A woman’s account of a life-changing 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in the summer of 1995. 6. Quiet by Susan Cain (Broadway, $16). Introverts — one-third of the population — are undervalued in American society. 7. American Sniper by Chris Kyle (Harper/HarperCollins, $9.99). Memoir by the Navy SEAL sniper killed in Texas. 8. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The winner of the Nobel in economic science discusses how we make choices in business and personal life. 9. Control by Glenn Beck and others ( Threshold Editions/ Mercury Radio Arts). An argument against gun restriction laws. 10. America the Beautiful by Ben Carson with Candy Carson (Zondervan, $14.99). The nation’s future informed by its past.
In Susan Crandall’s “Whistling Past the Graveyard,” it’s July, and 9-yearold Starla Jane Claudelle is getting tired of being pushed around by her tyrant of a grandmother, Mamie. Starla’s mother, Lulu, ran off to Nashville to be a singing star when Starla was only 3, and all Mamie cares about is raising her granddaughter to be a lady — unlike her daughter-inlaw.
Starla lives in Cayuga Springs with Mamie while her father, Porter, works on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. As the book opens, she is looking forward to the Fourth of July festivities and doing her best not to “sass” her grandmother in hopes of avoiding “restriction.” When Mamie suggests at breakfast that they change her name from the one her mother gave her (“Starla makes people think of a trailer park, just sittin’ there waiting for the next tornado”) to the more cultured “Jane,” Starla tries to keep her eyes on the prize: “Fireworks. Fireworks. Remember the fireworks. I shoved the Frosted Flakes in my mouth to keep all the words spinning around in my head from shootin’ out.”
It’s not long before those words and lots more come shooting out anyway. And after Starla breaks the nose of 12-year-old Jimmy Sellers, Mamie grounds her. When she sneaks out of the house to watch the parade, she is discovered by a nosy neighbor and makes a sudden decision to run away to Nashville and find her mother. Soon she is offered a ride by a young black woman named Eula, who has just picked up an infant abandoned on the steps of a local church. She has named the baby “James” and plans to take him home to her husband and raise him as their own. The only problem: It’s 1963, and James is white.
Set against a backdrop of explosive civil rights unrest, when even the most innocuous interaction between blacks and whites might erupt into violence, “Whistling Past the Graveyard” follows Starla and Eula from Cayuga Springs to Nashville with a few stops in between.
Along the way they meet good Samaritans like the kind teacher, Miss Cyrena, who opens her home to them when Starla Humanities Tennessee publishes Chapter16.org.
Chapter16.org
“Wisp of a Thing,” the new novel by West Tennessee native Alex Bledsoe, hinges on the mysteries of the Tufa, a secretive and storied people bent on protecting the ancient mysteries of their Smoky Mountain community.
According to legend, the Tufa have lived in the mountains and hollows of Cloud County since long before the earliest documented settlers. Known for their dark hair and complexion, they are not Native American, white or black, and their origins and customs remain disputed and mysterious, even to those who carry Tufa blood.
Musician Rob Quillen is drawn to Cloud County by a stranger’s promise that a song “on a hill, long forgotten, carved in stone” will heal his broken heart. Physically, Rob resembles the Tufa but is an outsider — a Bill-Monroe-worshipping songwriter from Kansas City who became famous by appearing on a reality TV show called “So You Think You Can Sing?” His decision to compromise his own music by entering the contest results in a highly publicized personal tragedy from which he has not yet recovered. The prospect of a heart-healing Tufa song leads him into the web of myths and curses in Cloud County.
Rob’s closest guide through these mysteries is Bliss Overbay, a First Daughter of the Tufa — a position of high standing — as well as a musician. She struggles to keep the traditions of her people both intact and hidden as they live, work and intermarry in the modern world. For the Tufa, music is paramount, but their changing culture raises questions. Who has the right to sing which songs?
In this novel, selling out can be a matter of life and death. Rob has paid a steep personal price for betraying his high musical principles: A tragic event connected with the show’s final round now tortures him with guilt. In the backwoods of Cloud County, meanwhile, Bliss wages a far more secretive battle against musical corruption: Her people can disappear if the wrong songs are merely sung aloud.
As befitting a novel set in the forest hollows of deepest Appalachia, “Wisp of a Thing” includes some very dark moments, particularly in its portrayal of women: a cursed feral girl slinking in and out of the dark woods, an unhappy wife on an ugly slide into alcoholism, and a formidable bootlegger so indulgent of her own huge appetites that she must be buried in her bed — these women come uncomfortably close to ugly caricature. In an early scene, Rob runs afoul of an aggressive Tufa faction, one of whom is an enormous woman named Tiffany. As she glares at him, Rob thinks, “Most fat people had little pig eyes, but Tiffany had huge, menacing black orbs that looked like they might roll over white like a shark’s.”
The first half of the novel teeters on these extreme portrayals, but once the elements of history, music and magic begin to line up for the final chapters’ stretch of climactic violence and consequences, the limitations of these female characters begin to open up, enriching the story and shifting the balance of power. Chapter16.org is an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.