The Songcatcher by Sharyn McCrumb Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Songcatcher
Book Review: McCrumb at her best
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful book, true to the spirit of Appalachia and full of interesting characters.It follows the history of a song through two centuries and interweaves the life of Malcolm McCorry, kidnapped from Islay in 1751 and a contemporary story of one of his descendants. It is a hard book to characterise, certainly it isn't a conventional mystery, even that is a plus. This book is magic.Book Review: Mysticism, Song, Mountain Lore, and Ancestral History
Summary: 4 Stars
The Songcatcher is historical fiction based on Sharyn McCrumb's genealogy tied together by a Celtic/Gaelic ballad passed down through the generations. The mystery is really the hunt for the ballad about The Rowan Stave:
Upon the hill above the kirk at moon rise she did stand, To tend her sheep that Samhain eve, with rowan staff in hand. And where she's been and what she's seen, no living soul may know, and when she's come back home, she will be changed-oh!
The Songcatcher takes the reader from the 18th century through 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in no specific order. Although some find the story disjointed, with too many characters and storylines, I really enjoyed meeting the ancestors of the present-day people who begin and end the novel. McCrumb's descriptions of the 18th century sailors at sea were so vivid you could taste the salt air. Knowing that these people were the predecessors of the 21st century folk gave the story continuity.
A recurring theme in The Songcatcher and McCrumb's other Appalachian books is mysticism, folklore, and superstition. A special white pebble becomes an amulet that protects Malcolm McCourry against the midwife's prediction that, "The Sea will take him." Nora Bonesteel, a 21st century Appalachian resident, has "The Sight." When someone dies, Nora already has the cake to take to the bereaved family baking in the oven. She also sees ghosts and talks to them.
The combination of mysticism, song, ancestral history, mountain lore makes The Songcatcher an enjoyable tale well-worth reading.
Book Review: Not her best...
Summary: 2 Stars
I've read all of Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian novels and eagerly looked forward to reading this one. I did finish it, but it seemed far more chore than pleasure. We spent so much time bouncing around between characters in different times and places that I never really developed much interest in any of them. I hoped I would become hooked right until the last page and was almost relieved when I finally finished. If you've never read Sharon McCrumb, try her earlier novels, particularly "She Walks These Hills," and "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter."Book Review: Sheer pleasure to read
Summary: 4 Stars
The Songcatcher was one of those wonderful discoveries. I picked up the book to read during a meal alone while on a business trip and was capitivated. Ms. McCrumb'interweaving of the story of the song's travel to Appalachia via the travels of Malcolm McCourry family, of the search for Lark McCourry, and of Lark's search for the song was masterful. I can't wait to read another of her books.Book Review: The History of a Song
Summary: 3 Stars
The Songcatcher tells the story of one North Carolina family and the song that it passed from one generation of the family to the next, a song that famous folk singer Lark McCourry hopes to find so that she can center her next record album around it. Malcolm McCourry, kidnapped in 1751 by English sailors at age nine and taken to sea, learned the song by hearing it on evenings during which the men sang ballads to entertain themselves and their shipmates. It was the kind of ghost story that an impressionable young boy would never forget, and McCourry brought the lyrics with him to America in 1759 when he decided that he was finished with life on the ocean.
Sharyn McCrumb looked to her own family history as inspiration for The Songcatcher. She discovered ancestor Malcolm McCourry while researching another book and framed this story around his real life experiences. McCrumb uses alternating sections within each chapter of the book to recount the events of Malcolm's life that resulted in him starting a second family in the mountains of North Carolina and the real world plight of Lark McCourry who is reluctantly returning to those same mountains to see her dying father one last time.
As the book progresses from generation to generation, it becomes obvious that Lark McCourry has much in common with her ancestors. Like them, she is basically a loner who manages to keep people at a distance and who suffers a poor relationship with her father, the kind of relationship that so many first-born McCourrys experienced over the years. But the song has survived everything that the family has experienced for more than two hundred years and it is up to Lark McCourry to make sure that her father does not take it with him to the grave.
Regular readers of Sharyn McCrumb will recognize some characters from her past "ballad novels." Sheriff Spencer Arrowood makes a relatively brief, but important, appearance in the book, and Nora Bonesteeel, an old woman who converses with the dead as easily as she does with the living, is there to help tie the McCourry generations together. Rather strangely, the book includes a side story that adds little or nothing to the main plot, a storyline involving a sheriff's deputy who manages to get his foot trapped beneath the wreckage of an old airplane that crashed into the mountain forests decades earlier. Because the book already alternates two distinct storylines, the addition of a third one into the mix, one that really doesn't go anywhere, is an unnecessary distraction.
Sharyn McCrumb has an interesting family history and, although The Songcatcher is not one of her strongest books, it is worth a look.