Book Review: Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Title: Silver Sparrow

Author: Tayari Jones

Tayari’s Info.: Website | Twitter | FB | Tumblr

352 pages, Publisher: Algonquin

Buy The Book: Amazon

From The Publisher:

With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters—the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle—she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another’s lives.

At the heart of it all are the two lives at stake, and like the best writers—think Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye—Jones portrays the fragility of these young girls with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women, just not as their mothers. (Summary provided by Algonquin.)

My Thoughts:

As some of you might remember, I belong to The Rumpus Book Club. Each month The Rumpus Book Club sends its member an advance reader’s copy or early release of an upcoming book. This month there were two selections, Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones and Orientation and Other Stories by Daniel Orozco, for club members to choose from.  I received both books and read Silver Sparrow first. And when I say that I read Silver Sparrow, I really mean I devoured it. I read  it in virtually one sitting. I could not put Jones’s suspenseful story of a man’s deceit and the pain it causes his family down even for a minute.

When I told my sister-in-law that the book was about bigamy, she said, “Like Sister Wives”? I think that might be a pretty common reaction, but that’s not what this book is about. It’s about a man, James,  with two wives and two daughters. One man. Two separate families. Only one wife and child knows about James’s double life. This struck me as a unique topic for a novel as I have not read a book lately with a similar plot. Tayari Jones took this unique plot and added to it a two point of view structure. The first half of the novel is told from the point of view of Dana, James’s daughter who knows about her father’s double life, and the other half is told by James’s other daughter, Chaurisse. I enjoyed the two POV structure because it caused me to have sympathy for both of James’s daughters and consequently for the mothers of his daughters as well.

There were so many things that I liked about this touching novel. It was not on my reading schedule for this month. However, when I picked it up to merely give the inside cover a glance, the story description grabbed me. I am so glad it did. Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones is an excellent piece of literary fiction that you are not going to want to miss.

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