Publishers Weekly
05/02/2022
Roberts (My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black) centers his lackluster latest on a woman whose facility with numbers enables her to make a meaningful career for herself. In 1929, 26-year-old Jo Salter’s mother, Mary, dies from measles. Jo, following her mother’s wishes, leaves their insular community of Big Pine Valley, N.C., for Asheville, where she lands a position as a teller at her uncle’s bank. Salter’s diligence and comfort with math makes her a valued asset, able to easily notice discrepancies in banking records and to reconcile them wherever possible. Those attributes catch the notice of her superiors just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 begins to impact her employer and community. As Salter becomes more confident in her work, she hooks up with a flatly drawn handsome bad boy, Levi Arrowood, owner of a speakeasy. That relationship has its predictable vicissitudes before Roberts concludes with an equally predictable resolution. Meanwhile, the author’s odd choice to present some, but not all, of the dialogue in transcript lends the narrative a choppy feel. Readers are likely to be left wanting. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary. (July)
From the Publisher
Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel.” —Library Journal
“Roberts has captured a moment in Asheville’s history that to this day affects our way of life. It is a well-told tale, reminiscent of John Ehle’s great novel, Last One Home. I think Ehle would have been proud of The Sky Club.” —Wayne Caldwell, author of Cataloochee
“Ever since Terry Roberts took up writing about his ancestors in Western North Carolina, he has produced a remarkably varied and valuable shelf of novels . . . but The Sky Club is the best one yet! Wildly original, this is a truly Appalachian novel all about money, sex, drinking, and the Great Depression . . . along with the more familiar themes of place and family. I especially admire the apparent ease with which Roberts has created the tough, true, funny, and unforgettable Jo Salter, an independent pistol of a woman who tells this lively tale set in a speakeasy on top of a mountain.” —Lee Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Girls
“The Sky Club is a wagonload of perilous fun. Terry Roberts has engaged, with customary vigor, many of his favorite themes: local Appalachian history, mountain cultures rural and urban, personal and communal courage, individuality. The resulting story is sprightly and steady in the manner of its heroine, the gifted Jo Salter. Every page here shines with truthful surprise. Bravo!” —Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever
“The Sky Club portrays diverse, unexpected facets of the Appalachian region in the years of the Great Depression. It is a novel of climbing—social, financial, emotional, romantic—to a mountaintop, to The Sky Club, to risk and wealth, to danger, and, ultimately, to enduring love.” —Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star
“With an uncanny ability to make you feel as if you were there—when the Great Depression hit Asheville—Terry Roberts gives voice to Jo Salter, a fiercely independent woman determined to honor her Mama’s dying request that she create a life hard to imagine. Not since Memoirs of a Geisha has a male author portrayed a woman’s life so convincingly.” —Mark Kaufman, Story and Song Bookstore
“In a page-turner set in 1929–1931, Terry Roberts bring us jazz, bootlegging, and financial collapse, as seen through the eyes of a forward-thinking young mountain woman seizing opportunities to flourish… Rural and urban, old ways and new possibilities meet in the speakeasy and jazz club that gives the novel its name, shaping every aspect of this first-rate narrative of economic and cultural upheaval, risk, loss, and love.” —North Carolina Literary Review
Library Journal
04/01/2022
It is the winter of 1929, and Josephine Salter's mother is dying. A final wish for her only daughter is that she leave rural North Carolina and make a life that her mother can only imagine. Soon after, Josephine moves to Asheville and reinvents herself as the modern woman Jo, independent and in pants. With a gift for numbers, Jo finds work at the local bank, an inconvenient place to be with the Great Depression looming. Thankfully her life is more than accounts; she's attracted to Levi Arrowood, the enigmatic manager of the Sky Club, a speakeasy Jo frequents to enjoy jazz music and apple brandy. Roberts (My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black) is adept at Southern fiction. But there is a frustration to the unlikely good fortune of his protagonist. Tragedy unfolds around Jo in every direction, yet in the end things always work out for her and often improve her life even as she moves further into Levi's underground world of bootlegging. It does keep the plot light-hearted and easy, despite the difficulties of the early 1930s. VERDICT Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel.—Shannon Marie Robinson
