The Songcatcher by Sharyn McCrumb Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Songcatcher
Book Review: Drove me crazy
Summary: 4 Stars
This book drove me crazy - I was always peeking at the next chapters trying to read ahead. It is a good historical novel which flip/flops chapters from old times to current times, filling in the years of the generations.Book Review: Enjoyable, but not the best of series
Summary: 3 Stars
For some reason, this one doesn't move me as much as others in this series. A little too much paralellism, perhaps, a little too much of the past and not enough of the presence? And it DOES annoy me when a novel about ballads gets details of a ballad wrong. McCrumb tells us that the demon in the House Carpenter is the carpenter himself, when it's the long-lost lover.Book Review: Family Story
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great story. It could make everyone who reads it become interested in geneology. Sharyn McCrumb at her best writing a true story from her family.Book Review: Fictionalized family tree story is a treat
Summary: 3 Stars
Sharyn McCrumb has given us a fictionalized version of her family tree, and it's a treat.
John Walker is dying and his housekeeper summons his estranged daughter home. His daughter, Linda, now a famous folksinger known as Lark, suffers an accident on the way home, however, and is stranded on a mountainside with faint chance of rescue. To see her through her ordeal, the 911 officer she managed to reach on her cell phone before the battery died promises to track down a folk song she heard when she was a child.
Interspersed with the events taking place in the present day is the story of Malcolm McCourry, a young Scots lad kidnapped by sailors in 1759, when he was nine years old. Although I was a bit confused the first time the story jumped back two hundred years, it didn't take me long to make the connection between Malcolm McCourry and John Walker, and I followed the subsequent years and generations with interest.
A quick read, and enjoyable.
Book Review: Good read, but not the best intro to McCrumb
Summary: 3 Stars
McCrumb's newest paperback is a ramblin' book. Its chapters form a mountain switchback. The odd chapters tell an episodic story set in the present, about rising country singer Lark McCourry , her difficult father, and her attempt to track down an old ballad about a graveyard and a rowan stave, of which she can remember only the one-line chorus: "And when she comes back, she will be changed-oh." The even chapters trace the progress of the song from Scotland in the mid-1700s to the present, through a long line of Lark's ancestors (each of whom, as it happens, is one of Sharyn McCrumb's real ancestors.)"The Songcatcher" affords many small pleasures and no sweeping ones. There's the local southern Appalachian color, and McCrumb's evident pride in it, particularly the constant sprinkling of unexpected hill country expressions (I liked "poor as Job's turkey", and I am not likely soon to forget the significance of Matthew 23:25). There are numerous interesting characters, though I felt only Malcolm McCourry, the founder of the line, was fully drawn and rounded. The ballad itself, which McCrumb wrote for the book, is as haunting and authentically folkwise as anything in Childe, and I wish the music came with it. What seemed to be missing was any deep passion, or any strong narrative drive. I was always happy to be reading along, but never dying to know what would happen next.
For members of McCrumb's extended family, this volume is bound to seem a treasure trove. The same may be true for those who have ever been bitten (as I never have) by the genealogy bug; and for those who have read enough of her previous novels to feel, as one might easily come to feel, that the author is an old friend. For the rest of us, this is a pleasant enough read, but probably the wrong place to start in on her works. Several of her previous Appalachian sagas have all the strengths of this one, and none of its weaknesses, and stand better on their own. The earlier books will also introduce you to a number of the local constabulary and eccentrics, with whose lives and habits this volume seems to assume you are already familiar.