Silver Sparrow

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Jeffrey Ricker, January 19, 2012 (view all comments by Jeffrey Ricker)
Stunning and beautiful, Silver Sparrow draws you in quietly at the beginning and keeps pulling you along breathlessly. Even when you know it will not end well, you can't resist. I wish every book I read could be this good.

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Forgets, January 2, 2012 (view all comments by Forgets)
This book opens with what seems like a spoiler, and explains itself away throughout the rest of the 350-something pages. “My father is a bigamist,” a girl tells us. And at first sight, that sentence told me what I needed to know about men in this book, and about the women "sisters and wives" who were being kept secret in each her own way. The story is divided in half, just like everything and everyone else in the book. Each half is narrated by one of the father’s two daughters, first Dana, then Chaurisse. Every single character here is torn, and yet there’s nothing similar or predictable about the voices we get to hear from. And what’s even better, the sisters and all the women in this book, even though they are set up to be rivals, really stick together. I was worried, when I saw that first line, about the stereotypes I expected to come, of fighting catty women and the pain of sharing a man of any kind, father or husband. No, although these women are in a mixed state of either knowing-but-not-caring, or knowing-and-in-pain, the main characters do reach out and take care of each other. And even worse, you manage to feel sorry for the bigamist, the daddy. James is a sad and ultimately pathetic man, who keeps one family in secret (a family who knows everything about him), and another family in public (a family that is missing a few crucial facts about their father). The idea of knowledge as privilege and simultaneous disadvantage plagues both halves of the novel. At first one might expect Chaurisse, the legitimate daughter, to benefit the most from having a known-father she lives with, but there is a sadness entering her half of the novel knowing something she doesn’t. How can she love a daddy she doesn’t really know? And Dana’s story, more frustrating in its nature, is having a father who is ashamed of her and will pay a high price to keep her and his mistress quiet.

Like most of Jones’s work, this book is set in Atlanta, Georgia, and it follows the lives of black young women in the 70s and 80s. I am not tired and will never tire of Jones’s characters
struggling in a way that hits so close to home. Silver Sparrow ties in the weight of the civil rights movement still controversial in the south, and sheds light on yet another dark spot of American history, illegitimate and alternative families, and the women affected by them. It is also a story about women of colour in which the characters have promising futures, and it touched me to see that although the sisters finally meet and the secret is found out, they have not lost hope even when few if any of their problems are resolved.

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columbo0808, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by columbo0808)
A wonderful novel from Tayari Jones that stay's with you long after the last page has been read. What an incredible talent!

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Product Details

ISBN:

9781565129900

Author:

Jones, Tayari

Publisher:

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Subject:

General Fiction

Subject:

Literature-A to Z

Edition Description:

Hardback

Publication Date:

20110531

Binding:

HARDCOVER

Language:

English

Pages:

352

Dimensions:

8.25 x 5.5 in