Book Reviews

July 22, 2011 In Silver Sparrow, the third novel from Tayari Jones, a girl named Dana Lynn Yarboro grows up a captive to her parents’ secrets: her father, James Witherspoon, who is married to her mother, has another wife and daughter. From an early age, Dana learns what it means to be an “outside child,” forbidden to tell anyone of her real father. But over time her desire to know her sister, and her desire to be known, gets the best of her, and she begins to pick away at the thin membrane of secrecy that keeps the girls apart. Set in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow is a thoughtful story about bigamy, but it is also a lovely, realistic portrait of two teenage African-American girls, and an exploration of the bonds between mothers and daughters. Tayari Jones will appear at the 2011 Southern Festival of Books, held October 14-16 in Nashville.

July 14, 2011 Joe Henry has made a career of his gift for penning unforgettable lyrics. He has worked with a variety of artists in multiple genres, from Vince Gill and Garth Brooks to John Denver and Burt Bacharach, and his songs have been recorded by artists as disparate as Frank Sinatra and Rascal Flatts. In Lime Creek, his debut work of fiction, Henry translates his gift for the transcendent insight and the unforgettable turn of phrase into an extended meditation on the lives of a ranching family in the high country of the mountain West.

July 12, 2011 For the first time, international best-selling author Steve Berry has set one of his Cotton Malone thrillers in the United States, and it has a Tennessee connection. When Malone sets out to defeat a band of modern-day pirates, he must first decipher a clue left by Andrew Jackson. The Jefferson Key opens with an attack on Old Hickory and rushes at breakneck speed through some of the dimmer recesses of American history, delivering an extra-large order of conspiracy, double-crosses, and wild action.