histfic-spring23

Stephanie Clifford’s second novel, The Farewell Tour, is both a dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey through a half-century of country music. 

At 57, country music star Lillian Waters—or Water Lil, as she’s known to her fans—is drinking too much and feeling her age, and she’s unable to write any new songs. Even worse, she keeps alienating almost everyone in her life. In short, Lillian’s washed up. When a doctor gives her more bad news—her voice is deteriorating due to polyps—she decides to hit the road one last time for a farewell summer tour. 

Lillian’s manager, Stanley, puts together a ragtag band of backup musicians and books some county fairs, but the tour gets off to a comically bad start. To try to salvage it, Lillian calls on her old friend Charlie Hagerty, a session musician and songwriter, and he agrees to join. 

The Farewell Tour alternates between the summer of 1980 (the novel’s present) and a retrospective sweep of Lillian’s life as told by the woman herself, beginning with her Depression-era childhood on a subsistence farm. Like real-life midcentury country legends Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Lillian overcomes a hardscrabble background and abusive early years, though she’s the daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers in Washington rather than from Appalachia or the Deep South. Obsessed with the country music that she first hears as a girl, Lillian sets out to beat the long odds, learning to play the guitar, writing her own songs and performing on radio stations. Over and over, she faces sexism and misogyny in her quest to make it big. But at the center of this epic story is a quiet mystery, a childhood episode that Lillian can’t quite let herself remember.

Full of marvelous period details about World War II-era Tacoma, Washington, and its proto-country music scene, as well as glitzy 1970s Nashville, Tennessee, The Farewell Tour covers a huge amount of ground, with a correspondingly large number of supporting characters, a sometimes dizzying array. Music fans will appreciate the references to real 20th-century country stars and industry players. Lillian herself is an appealing mix: determined and hard charging, blustery and often unable to get out of her own way. Like a country ballad, The Farewell Tour offers a bittersweet testament to the healing power of old love, long friendships and heartfelt songs.

It’s 1940, and Millie and Reginald Thompson face a difficult decision: How can they best protect their 11-year-old daughter from the trauma of World War II? Reginald’s own youth was marred by the worries of World War I, and he’ll do anything to protect his daughter’s childhood. He convinces Millie to send Beatrix to live with a family in the United States, far from the bombs that threaten the Thompsons’ London neighborhood. They’ll see her again after the war.

Beatrix arrives in Boston as a reserved preteen, but the Gregory family soon draws her out. She fits like a stair step between the family’s eldest son, William, and the younger, Gerald. During the five years she spends in New England, Bea gains confidence as she competes with the boys and finds support from parents Nancy and Ethan, who ensure that Bea has a safe place to call home. Bea is thriving in her new world, even if she doesn’t quite understand her own parents’ decision to send her away. But then, as the war winds down, Millie abruptly calls Bea back to England, and upon Bea’s return, both families struggle to understand their relationships to one another, formed in the crucible of war. 

Told from alternating perspectives of each family member over the course of nearly four decades, Beyond That, the Sea explores the ways that formative experiences remain with us throughout our lives. Several years after the war, Bea describes to William how it felt to return to her home country: “It was familiar, too, it was in my bones. As though this place is part of who I am. As though I was always meant to be here. As though I belong.” As Bea learns, the people we love remain with us, even after we lose touch. The Gregory family becomes a part of her, just as she carried her parents in her heart after leaving England. 

Debut novelist Laura Spence-Ash’s masterful character development enlivens the Thompson and Gregory families and all of the love and tension between them.

In the 1940s, a girl and her younger brother are sent from their home in a Polish ghetto to live with a Christian couple in the countryside. Born as Mira, Ana must change her identity to blend into her new home, while 3-year-old Daniel becomes Oskar. After the war, a Jewish woman kidnaps the children, as well as many others, and takes them on a long, difficult journey to a kibbutz in Israel so they can be raised in the Jewish faith.

While many books have been written about children transported to various places for safety during World War II, Jennifer Rosner’s moving, well-researched second novel takes a penetrating look at the myriad murky moral choices involved and the lives of these children after the war, including their lasting sense of displacement, confusion and conflicting allegiances. Fans of Rosner’s award-winning debut novel, The Yellow Bird Sings—about a Jewish mother and daughter hiding in Poland during World War II—will be pleased to see the author exploring these related strands of history. 

Rosner follows Ana and Oskar for decades, revealing the ways their age difference affected their very disparate responses to their turbulent early lives. Meanwhile, she also explores the stories of two other characters: Roger, a Jewish boy taken to a Catholic convent in 1940s France but later sent to live with extended family in Jerusalem; and Renata, a postgraduate archaeology student at Oxford University, who is excited to be on an excavation in 1968 Jerusalem. 

Each of these characters must reckon with secrets and the often unintended consequences of their pasts. At first, it’s puzzling to understand how Renata’s 1968 life relates to those of Roger, Ana and Oskar, but by the book’s conclusion, the connection is clear. Rosner does an excellent job of not judging the actions that adults take on behalf of her child characters while also deeply exploring the consequences. 

“Maybe there is no real home for a person who has been passed mother to mother to mother,” muses Ana in the 1960s. An excellent choice for book clubs, Once We Were Home gives readers much to ponder.