SILVER SPARROW
TAYARI JONES Oneworld, 340pp, £16.99
Tayari Jones secured the 2019 Women’s Prize for fiction, and her novel was endorsed by the Obamas and by Oprah. No pressure for her new novel, Silver Sparrow, then. Sara Collins, writing in the Guardian, had no difficulty commending this book: it is ‘as moving, intimate and
‘This novel speaks of one of literature’s most intriguing extended families’
wise as An American Marriage on the topics of marriage, family and womanhood, and deserves similar acclaim’. As the book explores the unsteady terrain of coming of age, Collins admired Jones’s ‘shrewd observations’.
Two African American half sisters strike up an uneven friendship. Dana is the secret, illegitimate daughter who knows that she is related to Chaurisse, while Chaurisse, the official daughter who calls their father ‘Daddy’, is unaware of the dynamic between them. The novel examines the multitudinous effects of bigamy — how it can extend families, break them, confuse identity and damage lives.
Francesca Carington, writing in the Telegraph, found the novel moving: ‘Bigamy is what gives the novel its dramatic impetus, but it’s the double coming-of-age story that gives it heart.’ For Anita Shreve in the Washington Post, the reader’s compassion is manoeuvred from character to character: ‘Blame the bigamist, who turns out to be a pretty good guy; blame the too tolerant wife, whose bitterness seeps into Dana’s silver skin; then blame the bigamist again for getting Laverne pregnant when she was just 14.’ For her, this novel speaks of one of literature’s most intriguing extended families.
One consequence of ‘this beautiful tribute to children’, remarked Claire Kohda Hazelton in the Spectator, is that at last the unacknowledged child has a designated name. In an interview at the end of the book the author describes emails she has received from readers. One begins: ‘I guess I am a Silver Sparrow. I just never had a name for it.’