Follow Me

February 16, 2009
A granddaughter sifts through her grandmother’s rich and mysterious life in Pulitzer finalist Scott’s latest. As a teenager in 1946, Sally Werner experiences something between rape and seduction at the hands of her cousin, resulting in a baby, family shame and her running away. Each time Sally feels her past catching up with her, she finds a new town and assumes a new identity, eventually graduating from taking the charity—and more—of others to supporting herself. A doomed love affair, a cat and mouse chase with the brutal father of a second child, and a longing for safety and freedom keep Sally moving until she settles down and her daughter, Penelope, inherits her restless energy. As the novel, and Sally’s life, draws to a close, we get a final look at this remarkable woman through the eyes of her granddaughter, also named Sally, and through the younger Sally’s once absent father, Abe. A retelling of the archetypal American journey from a female perspective, this rendering of the perils and triumphs facing women is imbued with a questing spirit.

March 15, 2009
Scott (Everybody Loves Somebody, 2006, etc.) follows the life journey of an impoverished farm girl who repeatedly reinvents herself as she moves from town to town in northern Pennsylvania.

In 1947, 16-year-old Sally Werner, the daughter of German immigrants, is seduced and impregnated by a cousin. Leaving behind her newborn son, she runs away and begins a new life in a small community along the Tuskee River. But when someone from home recognizes her, Sally panics. She steals cash from her kindly employer and runs further north to a new town where she calls herself Sally Angel. She falls in love with a teenager named Mole who makes her genuinely happy until local rich boy Benny carelessly runs Mole's car off the road. Unaware of his role in Mole's death, grief-stricken Sally has a brief affair with Benny before she senses his mean streak. She runs again although she soon realizes she is carrying Benny's baby. As Sally Mole she finds friendship, a good job and a satisfying life with her daughter Penelope in the town of Tuskee until Benny finds her and beats her up. Correctly fearing that he'll attempt to take her daughter away, Sally runs with Penelope to Rondo where as Sally Bliss she raises Penelope while working as a legal secretary and carrying on a romance with her married boss. Sally's story is narrated by her granddaughter, who is also tracing her own parental history. Penelope never knew why her fianc Abe disappeared before the narrator's birth, although early on the narrator drops the bombshell—Abe left when Sally told him he was her long-lost son. The romantic tragedy is that Sally was mistaken. The novel begins to peter out when Abe initiates contact with the narrator to give her the facts. Abe's story is just not as interesting as Sally's.

Scott's luminous prose, references to world events and hints of magical realism never quite coalesce, but Sally is a character of mythic proportions.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2009
It is 1947, and teenager Sally Werner is on the run in rural Pennsylvania, fleeing her family and the newborn son conceived after a brief encounter with an older cousin. She follows the river north on the first of several abrupt, desperate journeys that take her farther from each reinvented life. Depending upon the kindness of strangers generally works, but tragic and violent love affairs leave Sally with emotional and physical scars as well as a daughter, Penelope. Over six decades, we follow mother and daughter and then granddaughter and namesake, Sally, who serves as narrator and as her grandmother's confidante. The elder Sally finds contentment later in life, but secrets and misunderstandings threaten Penelope's happiness. Through it all, the fictional Tuskee River keeps flowing, and sightings of a mythical creature periodically occur. While Scott ("The Manikin") finely dissects the lives of these American women with realism and respect, the work sometimes sags beneath its own weighty detail. An optional purchase.Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast Lib.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2009
Scott, her literary gifts recognized with MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, is profoundly attuned to humankinds endless quest to channel lifes wildness. In this enrapturing saga of an invincible woman who transforms herself the way a landscape changes with the seasons, Scott draws on a matrix of mythic themes and pastoral sensibilities to explore age-old conflicts between willfulness and powers beyond our control. Sally Werner, the daughter of harshly religious German immigrants, is a lovely, hardworking 16-year-old in 1946 in rural Pennsylvania. She cant resist her war-veteran cousins offer of a motorcycle ride, or ward off his advances, but she does have the mettle to leave her newborn son and run away to seek her fortune. Dazzling descriptions are interrupted by heart-revving suspense as Sally finds refuge and trouble in struggling small towns, charming people with her glorious singing and fleeing whenever danger looms. As is her wont, Scott bends time as Sallys granddaughter pieces together her familys fractured history of violent passion and indelible guilt helplessly enacted in a place of misery, beauty, and mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)