The Sky Club

May 2, 2022
Roberts (My Mistress’ Eyes Are Raven Black) centers his lackluster latest on a woman whose facility with numbers enables her to make a meaningful career for herself. In 1929, 26-year-old Jo Salter’s mother, Mary, dies from measles. Jo, following her mother’s wishes, leaves their insular community of Big Pine Valley, N.C., for Asheville, where she lands a position as a teller at her uncle’s bank. Salter’s diligence and comfort with math makes her a valued asset, able to easily notice discrepancies in banking records and to reconcile them wherever possible. Those attributes catch the notice of her superiors just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 begins to impact her employer and community. As Salter becomes more confident in her work, she hooks up with a flatly drawn handsome bad boy, Levi Arrowood, owner of a speakeasy. That relationship has its predictable vicissitudes before Roberts concludes with an equally predictable resolution. Meanwhile, the author’s odd choice to present some, but not all, of the dialogue in transcript lends the narrative a choppy feel. Readers are likely to be left wanting. Agent: Margaret Sutherland Brown, Folio Literary.

April 1, 2022

It is the winter of 1929, and Josephine Salter's mother is dying. A final wish for her only daughter is that she leave rural North Carolina and make a life that her mother can only imagine. Soon after, Josephine moves to Asheville and reinvents herself as the modern woman Jo, independent and in pants. With a gift for numbers, Jo finds work at the local bank, an inconvenient place to be with the Great Depression looming. Thankfully her life is more than accounts; she's attracted to Levi Arrowood, the enigmatic manager of the Sky Club, a speakeasy Jo frequents to enjoy jazz music and apple brandy. Roberts (My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black) is adept at Southern fiction. But there is a frustration to the unlikely good fortune of his protagonist. Tragedy unfolds around Jo in every direction, yet in the end things always work out for her and often improve her life even as she moves further into Levi's underground world of bootlegging. It does keep the plot light-hearted and easy, despite the difficulties of the early 1930s. VERDICT Fans of historical and American Southern fiction will breeze through this action-packed, fast-paced novel.--Shannon Marie Robinson

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