Stephanie Clifford’s second novel, The Farewell Tour, is each a dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey via a half-century of nation music.
At 57, nation music star Lillian Waters—or Water Lil, as she’s recognized to her followers—is ingesting an excessive amount of and feeling her age, and she or he’s unable to jot down any new songs. Even worse, she retains alienating nearly everybody in her life. In quick, Lillian’s washed up. When a health care provider offers her extra unhealthy information—her voice is deteriorating on account of polyps—she decides to hit the highway one final time for a farewell summer time tour.
Lillian’s supervisor, Stanley, places collectively a ragtag band of backup musicians and books some county gala’s, however the tour will get off to a comically unhealthy begin. To attempt to salvage it, Lillian calls on her outdated buddy Charlie Hagerty, a session musician and songwriter, and he agrees to affix.
The Farewell Tour alternates between the summer time of 1980 (the novel’s current) and a retrospective sweep of Lillian’s life as advised by the lady herself, starting along with her Depression-era childhood on a subsistence farm. Like real-life midcentury nation legends Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Lillian overcomes a hardscrabble background and abusive early years, although she’s the daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers in Washington moderately than from Appalachia or the Deep South. Obsessed with the nation music that she first hears as a woman, Lillian units out to beat the lengthy odds, studying to play the guitar, writing her personal songs and acting on radio stations. Over and over, she faces sexism and misogyny in her quest to make it huge. But on the heart of this epic story is a quiet thriller, a childhood episode that Lillian can’t fairly let herself bear in mind.
Full of marvelous interval particulars about World War II-era Tacoma, Washington, and its proto-country music scene, in addition to glitzy Nineteen Seventies Nashville, Tennessee, The Farewell Tour covers an enormous quantity of floor, with a correspondingly giant quantity of supporting characters, a typically dizzying array. Music followers will recognize the references to actual Twentieth-century nation stars and business gamers. Lillian herself is an interesting combine: decided and arduous charging, blustery and sometimes unable to get out of her personal method. Like a rustic ballad, The Farewell Tour gives a bittersweet testomony to the therapeutic energy of outdated love, lengthy friendships and heartfelt songs.
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