This was a great novel that I enjoyed all the way through. It flashes back and forth in time between the 70's era and modern day, with original song lyrics at the end of each chapter. Through the first half of the book I found the past more interesting than the present, but that changed mid-point when both eras picked up speed.
The entire book is filled with amusement at life's occurrences, some of it laugh out loud in nature, but much of it simply gentle touches of humor. I mean, really, who wouldn't buy bibles with scandalous covers at the previous adult toy shop/now Bible Outlet as a means to get in the employee's pants?
Toward the end of the novel things take an unexpected turn, tearing at the heartstrings, which is especially rough after you spend most of the book chuckling your way through it.
There's a line in the book which I cannot wait to use in real life about someone the characters were less than affectionate about - "Roll you into a ditch, pour some gravy on you and let the dogs out."
Make sure you read the excerpt below from the chapter "Crazy Mama" - it is fabulous and gives an excellent flavor of the book!
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Mercer University Press
September, 2018
SET LIST begins in 1970, when Blanchard Shankles and John Covey come together and start making music in a rock and roll band named Skyye. They were two young men from Sequoyah, Georgia, with limited prospects and big dreams, who were joined in their quest for fame and fortune by their friends Ford Man Cooper, Chicken Raines, Jimbo Tant, Tucker McFry, and Simpson Taggart.
These fledgling musicians set out upon a musical voyage that spanned four decades, fifty states, and uncounted miles as they pursued the elusive success that was always just one song ahead of them. Along the way the band played bars and clubs, carnivals and dances, dives and festivals, and together through good times and bad, sickness and health, romance, marriage, divorce, birth, and death, they each built two lives: the one out under the lights that they were drawn to like moths to a flame, and the one they came back to when the music stopped and the crowds went home.
The story alternates between present-day North Georgia and the 1970s and is the story of a bar band as told primarily through the eyes of its lead guitar player, Blanchard Shankles, and its bass player, John Covey. Each chapter is built around an original song in the band's repertoire plus an iconic song from the archives of rock and roll, and together these songs and these chapters form the set list of the band members' lives.
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Excerpt:
“Crazy Mama”
J. J. Cale
-1969-
J. J. Cale
-1969-
Long
before Blanchard Shankles ever even thought about having a bad heart, his
mother, Edna, went completely insane. She had been flirting with the idea for
years and had conducted a few scouting expeditions into the darkness at various
times during her adult life, but those had been brief two- or three-day
dalliances with the Lords of Madness and nothing to get into a twist about. But
when her scalawag of a husband, Benton, plopped her down in Sequoyah, Georgia,
in 1967 and left her and her two children to mostly fend for themselves while
he spent his spare time pursuing loose women, hard liquor, and the broken
promises of lost youth, she discarded all pretense of normalcy and became, as
her spouse poetically phrased it at every opportunity, “as crazy as a sack full
of shithouse rats,” which was to say, crazy indeed. From the time she stepped
off the edge until the day Benton died, he used her insanity as an excuse for
his tomfoolery, although in point of fact, his roguishness had been one of if
not the main precipitating factor in
her final decline, rather than a result of it. That was Blanchard’s opinion, at
least, and it was up near the top of the extensive list of reasons he disliked
the man with an intensity not often seen between father and son. Subsequent to
his mother’s fall into the lower, darker realms of her mind, he hated his
father even more.
In
his later years, after he had reached adulthood and acquired perspective, or at
least a better vocabulary, Blanchard came to the realization that an
unrealistic ideal had finally carried his mother away, which did not lessen his
father’s culpability in the least. When she had married, at eighteen to the
first man who asked her, she had done so with the understanding that this was
what she was supposed to do, that it was her purpose in life. In the natural
order of things, it was why she was here. She was expected to marry a man, have
his children, keep his house, and in all ways be a good and loving wife to that
husband of hers. She had been led to believe that this was the path to
fulfillment, her road to the unimaginable and intangible joys of womanhood.
Unfortunately,
by the time she discovered that she had been sold a shoddy bill of goods and
was not a good fit for this lifestyle, she was in too deep to recover. The boat
had sailed and she could not swim, so there was no way back to shore. She had
been shanghaied into a life of domesticity for which she was not even remotely
suited. A better avenue by far would have been to move to the city, buy a cat
or two, and work in the public library or become an old maid schoolteacher.
These were the two primary occupations open to unmarried women back in the
1950s, and she would have excelled at either. But in life as in skydiving,
there are no do-overs. When after a few years of marriage, the cerebral
dissonance that was the fabric of her existence became unbearable, her only
escape lay within, so that is where she went.
Her
final descent into bedlam happened literally overnight. When her two
children—Blanchard, fourteen, and his older sister, Geneva, sixteen—went to bed
that fateful evening, their mother was playing solitaire with a dog-eared deck
that contained forty-nine cards, chain-smoking Raleigh cigarettes, and singing
along with the songs on her transistor radio. This was not unusual behavior and
was a fair representation of how she spent a great deal of her time. The two
youngsters had grown used to looking after themselves and each other over the
years and thought very little about their mother’s parallel existence to their
own. She occupied the same house that they did, but not the same world, and
this existential dichotomy gave them no cognitive pause; it was just the way
things were. Water was wet, winter was cold, and something about their mama
just wasn’t quite right.
When
they awakened that next morning, however, the mother who had casually ignored
both of them for their entire lives was gone, and in her place was something
quite different. They learned quickly that day that newer is not always better,
and that the devil one knew was generally preferable to the unknown. The fresh
addition to the family vaguely resembled her predecessor physically, but the
similarities seemed to end there. Edna 2.0 had arrived, and she had done a bit
of redecorating to celebrate the unveiling while her progeny was sleeping.
—excerpted from Set List by Raymond L. Atkins, forthcoming from Mercer University Press, September 2018. Used with permission.