From Library Journal
Set on the road, in forlorn honky-tonks and eventually in Carnegie Hall and a Nashville recording studio, this novel from the author of Fatal Light (LJ 5/15/97) documents the career of country musician Sapper Reeves and the Still Creek Boys. Sapper's banjo melodies are haunting, and his original lyrics inspired, but for years his achievements are minimal. He loves nothing more than his wife and son, but his constant touring tears the family apart. Only after his career seems shattered and his son is almost destroyed by combat in Vietnam does Sapper finally attain success with his music and and a better family life. Narrated mainly in brief vignettes, the story is sparse but engaging. Like many country songs, it displays aching loneliness and bitter failure but also the redemptive power of love and fidelity to one's dreams. Currey's terseness averts sentimentality but still offers homey wisdom and celebrates abiding human values. Recommended for most collections.?Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
As Sapper Reeves drives home in the night from Nashville to Maxwell, West Virginia, after recording his latest album, he recalls his abortive early career, some of the demoralized times when he wasn't playing and lived separately from his wife, Riva, and son, Bobby, and the gnawing pain inflicted by Bobby's maiming in the Vietnam War, which occurred just as Sapper was getting a second chance in music. Currey parcels out Sapper's memories in little chapters that quietly, vividly conjure weather, terrain, and buildings as well as the people Sapper and the other two Still Creek Boys (Sapper's original "combo") encounter on their desperately modest performance tours through the 1950s upper South. Despite these descriptive beauties and the appeal of Sapper's self-possessed persona, the book is hampered by a vocabulary more literary than seems credible in a narrator who never mentions reading anything, by clots of vague prose poetry, and by a disconcerting reticence about music. But how many other country-music novels are there?
Ray Olson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.