Stephanie Clifford’s second novel, The Farewell Tour, is each a dual-timeline redemption story and an epic journey by way of a half-century of nation music.
At 57, nation music star Lillian Waters—or Water Lil, as she’s identified to her followers—is ingesting an excessive amount of and feeling her age, and he or she’s unable to put in writing any new songs. Even worse, she retains alienating virtually everybody in her life. In brief, Lillian’s washed up. When a health care provider provides her extra dangerous information—her voice is deteriorating as a consequence of polyps—she decides to hit the highway one final time for a farewell summer season 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 dangerous 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 To attempt to salvage it, Lillian calls on her outdated buddy Charlie Hagerty, a session musician and songwriter, and he agrees to affix.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 season of 1980 (the novel’s current) and a retrospective sweep of Lillian’s life as advised by the girl herself, starting along with her Melancholy-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 quite than from Appalachia or the Deep South. Obsessive about 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. Time and again, she faces sexism and misogyny in her quest to make it massive. However on the heart of this epic story is a quiet thriller, a childhood episode that Lillian can’t fairly let herself bear in mind.
Stuffed with marvelous interval particulars about World Conflict 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 variety of supporting characters, a generally dizzying array. Music followers will recognize the references to actual Twentieth-century nation stars and trade gamers. Lillian herself is an interesting combine: decided and laborious charging, blustery and infrequently unable to get out of her personal manner. Like a rustic ballad, The Farewell Tour gives a bittersweet testomony to the therapeutic energy of outdated love, lengthy friendships and heartfelt songs.
