Come and Go, Molly Snow
by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall
“Music—the melding of grief and desire and sex and nature into music—is the soul of this lovely book. Elvis would have loved it!”
—Bobbie Ann Mason
“This book has an authority as generous as its compassion. It is just beautifully written.”
—Wendell Berry
From the paperback cover:
Carrie Marie Mullins is a Kentucky bluegrass fiddler and the only woman in the
Hawktown Road band. She loves the wild music and late hours and has fallen hard
for Cap Dunlap, Hawktown’s magnetic lead guitarist. But most of all she loves
her five-year-old daughter, Molly Snow. When she suddenly loses Molly in a
senseless accident, Carrie cannot fathom how to move on and make sense of it all.
Yet with the help of two wonderfully sustaining older women who understand
the healing power of the day-to-day, Carrie gradually takes hold of her guilt
and soul-tearing grief, and her intense feelings for Cap, until she finds the
strength to pick up her bow and draw once more on the power of her musical gift.
“There’s music in Come and Go, Molly Snow ... but something grander, too,
something almost sublime: the song of a woman’s loss and pain, and the song of her redemption.”
—Los Angeles Times
“This vernacular and gorgeous book very simply and without frills takes it all on,
from the hilarious to the shattering, and leaves you with a lingering, hard-to-place
tune in your ears.”
—Elle
“Mighty fine.... Mary Ann Taylor-Hall’s real achievement in her first novel is to bring us inside a grieving woman’s mind and enrich us with her grief.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Exquisite.... As in Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, the events of this story are searing, but the writing is like a plaintive, unforgettable song.... Not to be missed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Lush and loaded as a bluegrass lick.... Come and Go, Molly Snow is as contagious as the music it describes.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Music spills out of this story.... The language is fresh, strong, and as appealing as Carrie Marie Mullins.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Recommended reading.... One’s interest is consistently held by the sheer wealth of feeling that the author’s mellow prose sets flowing through the pages.”
—The New Yorker
“A remarkable first novel.... [Carrie’s] passion fills this novel with lyrical intensity. Her spirit leaps from the narrative like an inspired improvisation.”
—People
“In writing of great beauty and honesty, Taylor-Hall has achieved that rare thing, a genuine evocation of a mother’s grief. One reads this novel with a kind of dull ache in the chest.”
—New York Newsday
“This book is more finely crafted than a wooden instrument and more deeply honest than a mountain song. It picked me up and won’t let go of me.... It made me even more in love with the world.”
—Pam Houston
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