Wait for me A novel

Burns (Mercury) serves up an evocative if contrived tale of how music legends are born. In 1973, Elle Harlow is a 22-year-old rising folk singer from Appalachia, where she was taught music by a healer named Merry, who gave her a special mandolin. Shortly after her debut performance at the Grand Ole Opry, Elle disappears. In 1991, Marijohn Shaw, 18, works at her father's gas station and makes music with her best friend, Laz. Her father, Abe, claims to be the last person to see Elle, on the same night he found Marijohn abandoned in a wicker basket and decided to raise her as his own. One night, Marijohn and Laz get together to record a video of themselves performing a song, with Laz playing the mandolin Marijohn was found with as a baby. Later, the tape is broadcast by a local TV station, after which Marijohn is visited by a mysterious woman who demands her mandolin back, setting off a chain of events that will wed Elle's past to Marijohn's future. Though it's rich with Appalachian atmosphere, the novel is undone by too many preposterous plot developments and some awkward exposition. This has its moments, but it doesn't quite take flight. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Mar.)

A young woman struggles to understand her relationship to a country music legend. Marijohn Shaw's origin story sounds a little like a fairy tale: As an infant, she was found nestled in a basket outside a gas station in a rural Appalachian town and raised by Abe Shaw, the lonely but kind man who owns the place. The only clues to her identity were a note stating her first name and a broken mandolin. But just before Abe found her that day in 1973, he'd had a memorable customer: Elle Harlow, a young country singer-songwriter on the cusp of success. Abe was a huge fan, but like all Elle's fans he was about to be disappointed. After a betrayal and a public act of violence, she disappeared, but Abe has always believed she's connected to Marijohn. As the novel opens in 1991, those events are 18 years in the past, and Marijohn is facing questions about her future as well as her past. Then, through a bizarre series of events featuring a meteor and a video, Elle reappears, right on Abe's doorstep, demanding the return of the mandolin and seemingly denying any relationship to Marijohn. Where she has been and why she chose to vanish form much of the book's plot as it moves among several timelines, recounting Elle's childhood in Appalachia and her formative friendship with a folk healer and musician named Merry, then her ambitious flight to Nashville to pursue a career in music, first successfully, then disastrously. In the book's present, Elle becomes the kind of mentor to Marijohn that Merry was to her but struggles to imagine her own future. Some of Elle's self-examinations of her motives and the lyrical passages about the saving grace of music get repetitive, and a couple of romances lean toward the too-good-to-be-true. But the novel is insightful in its depiction of complex relationships between women and of the grueling and sometimes dark sides of the music business. Two women learn that music and friendship can bloom from loss and hard times. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.