Book Review: The Songcatcher

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Songcatcher

Author: Sharyn McCrumb

Author's web site: http://sharynmccrumb.com/

Date: 2002

Publisher: Penguin/Signet

ISBN: 0-451-20250-3

Length: 398 pages

Quote: “It was the family’s ballad. It was her own.”

Malcolm McCourry was real. Born in Scotland, he immigrated to New Jersey and then to North Carolina. The writer known as Sharyn McCrumb is one of his descendants in the real world. In this novel she gives him a fictional descendant called Lark (originally Linda) McCourry, who traces his family history through the real nineteenth century until the family branched off into the fictional world where Lark exists.

In real life, the descendants of Malcolm McCourry passed down some real folk songs that have been published in books and recorded by professional musicians. For fictional purposes, Lark’s branch of the family preserve a song that was actually written in America, in the twentieth century, for this novel. Amazon would like you to know that the song has been recorded, just for readers of Songcatcher:

So what’s the novel like? Well, it has everything novel readers expect from McCrumb. Nice clear writing—I refuse to say “luminous prose.” (The day I type that cliche, no matter how good the writer's prose style may be, I want someone to take me outside and stick my head in a bucket. Bah humbug. McCrumb writes well.) Vivid sense of place. Realistic details, down to the names of existing businesses that wanted to be mentioned in a novel, right on the streets in the towns where they really exist. Life-and-death suspense, including (in this story) a man who may or may not survive a plane crash, with or without help from the ghost of another man who died in another plane crash. Strong women characters, although the stories have solid men characters too. Funny bits, sad bits, spooky bits, and a built-in sound track of beautiful old Celtic-Appalachian songs.

I’m not a big fan of the kind of novel that tells its story by bouncing around through time, with a section set in 1751 followed by a passage set in 1999 followed by one from 1794 and another one from 1999 and another one from 1916 and so on. The Songcatcher is that kind of novel. Novelists can get in some special effects by jumping back and forward through time but I have more patience with fictional stories when they’re told in chronological order...I really liked She Walks These Hills. If, however, you have time to sit back and enjoy some of those special effects from a layers-of-time novel, you’ll probably love The Songcatcher. Malcolm McCourry’s known descendants are recalled to plausible life up into 1916: real people, real adventures, real Appalachian History told by one of our best storytellers.

To buy it here, send $5 per book plus $5 per package to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or that amount plus $1 per online payment to the Paypal address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. From this base price of $10 this web site will send $1 to McCrumb or a charity of her choice. The $5 shipping fee includes as many other books as fit into the package; you could easily fill more than one $5 package with paperback copies of the mostly fairly thick suspense novels McCrumb had published before 2008, and if you did we'd send McCrumb or her charity $1 for each novel. Novels she's published since 2008 can also be ordered here, or from her web site, as new books. (What hillbilly could possibly resist a NASCAR-inspired novel titled St. Dale?) Several of the older ones are still in print and available as new books; buy them that way by all means, if you can afford to, to show respect.