Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel - Hardcover

Taylor-Hall, Mary Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393037355 ISBN 13: 9780393037357

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1995

Synopsis

In a novel as sad and sweet as a bluegrass fiddler's song, Carrie Mullins falls for a heartbreaking man, loses her daughter, and learns the healing power of music and daily routine from two caring, older women.

About this title

Reviews

Carrie Marie Mullins is a hot-lick fiddler in a bluegrass band; and, like her, the author "puts English on the melody" in this lyrically told first novel. The daughter of a jazzman who died a tawdry death in a Florida motel room, Carrie followed her music to Lexington, Ky., when she was 18. She has gotten ahead on wits and elbow grease, choosing as a father for her child a transient of good humor and genes and fitting the idea of all-woman band around the edges of her life. Cap Dunlap is a can't-be-had guitarist with whom Carrie is silently obsessed. After he asks her to sit in with his band, Cap and Carrie struggle with unspoken desire, and she's daydreaming about him when her five-year-old, enchanting daughter Molly Snow careens down the driveway and is killed by a truck. Protective of the emotionally friable Carrie, Cap entrusts her to Ona and Ruth Barkley, feisty old sisters-in-law on a hardscrabble farm. Carrie's soul-tearing grief, regret, ambivalence about the future and resurrected inner strength are rendered in unstintingly pain-filled, exquisite prose. As in Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World, the events of this story are searing, but the writing is like a plaintive, unforgettable song, and the book is not to be missed.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Opening in a haze much like the one experienced by the main character, country singer Carrie Marie Mullins, Taylor-Hall's novel clears up a bit as the reason for Carrie's depression becomes clear. She has lost her young daughter in a tragic accident and lives in the shadow of her own childhood, which was marked by her father's suicide. She is slowly recovering under the care of two elderly women who keep her busy with housework and ask no probing questions. Meanwhile, her band needs their amazing country fiddler back, and her chance at stardom hangs in the balance. Taylor-Hall has composed a beautiful, moody novel with a character that will live in readers' hearts. Denise Perry Donavin

Bluegrass singer and single mother Carrie Mullins loves three things: her daughter, Molly; playing fiddle in the Hawktown Road band; and the band's lead guitarist, the impossibly handsome heartbreaker Cap Dunlap. When Molly is killed in an accident, Carrie is unable to find pleasure in her music or Cap. Only after Carrie spends time with two older women, Cap's grandmother and his great aunt, do her emotional wounds begin to heal. It's to this first novelist's credit that she does not give in to the temptation of providing a happily-ever-after ending. She allows Carrie the time and space to do her grieving and realistically portrays the process of the painfully slow recovery from the death of a child. With a writing sytle as melodic and haunting as a good bluegrass song, this book belongs in most public libraries.
Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393037355
• ISBN 13: 9780393037357
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269