Come and Go, Molly Snow: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1995

Things look good for Carrie Marie Mullins, a Kentucky bluegrass fiddler and the only woman in the Hawktown Road band. She loves the wild music and the late hours. She also loves Cap Dunlap, Hawktown's roughly handsome lead guitarist - she fell hard for him the minute she set eyes on him. But she knows that Cap's not a one-woman kind of man, so "she stomps down that feeling with her cute cowboy boots." And almost succeeds. Without warning, Carrie's beloved daughter, five-year-old Molly, dies in a senseless accident. We meet Carrie a month later, as she recuperates on a ridgy, drought-struck farm. Struggling with loss and her own sanity, cared for by Ona and Ruth, two wonderfully sustaining older women who understand the healing power of the day-to-day, she gradually reaches to take hold of the fact of her life: her guilt and her grief; the cost of her long obsession with Cap; the responsibilities and privileges of her gift for that life-giving music.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Carrie Marie Mullins is a hot-lick fiddler in a bluegrass band; and, like her, the author "puts English on the melody" in this lyrically told first novel. The daughter of a jazzman who died a tawdry death in a Florida motel room, Carrie followed her music to Lexington, Ky., when she was 18. She has gotten ahead on wits and elbow grease, choosing as a father for her child a transient of good humor and genes and fitting the idea of all-woman band around the edges of her life. Cap Dunlap is a can't-be-had guitarist with whom Carrie is silently obsessed. After he asks her to sit in with his band, Cap and Carrie struggle with unspoken desire, and she's daydreaming about him when her five-year-old, enchanting daughter Molly Snow careens down the driveway and is killed by a truck. Protective of the emotionally friable Carrie, Cap entrusts her to Ona and Ruth Barkley, feisty old sisters-in-law on a hardscrabble farm. Carrie's soul-tearing grief, regret, ambivalence about the future and resurrected inner strength are rendered in unstintingly pain-filled, exquisite prose. 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, and the book is not to be missed.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Bluegrass singer and single mother Carrie Mullins loves three things: her daughter, Molly; playing fiddle in the Hawktown Road band; and the band's lead guitarist, the impossibly handsome heartbreaker Cap Dunlap. When Molly is killed in an accident, Carrie is unable to find pleasure in her music or Cap. Only after Carrie spends time with two older women, Cap's grandmother and his great aunt, do her emotional wounds begin to heal. It's to this first novelist's credit that she does not give in to the temptation of providing a happily-ever-after ending. She allows Carrie the time and space to do her grieving and realistically portrays the process of the painfully slow recovery from the death of a child. With a writing sytle as melodic and haunting as a good bluegrass song, this book belongs in most public libraries.
Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 269 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 2nd edition (February 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393037355
• ISBN-13: 978-0393037357
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #584,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hypnotic journey into the core of life's melodies., July 9, 2003

By 

Jessica R. Costello "web geek" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Come and Go, Molly Snow (Paperback)

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall lives down the road from my aunt's farm in Kentucky. I have never met her, but I feel like I know her already. This novel, her first, is one of the best works of literature that I have ever read. Ever since I received my first copy of the book, one autographed to my grandmother, I have never let it slip out of my mind.

The reader cannot help but journey into the very core of Carrie. When she holds her fiddle, it is as if the wooden masterpiece is also extending from your hands. The drones omitted from the pages go directly to the reader's ears, never ceasing to convey the sorrow and utter hopelessness that she feels.

This book is amazing, and I recommend it to anyone who has a heart beating inside of their chest. You will read it and beg for more -- at least I did.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm enchanted by the poetry of her words and music passion, June 19, 1998

By 

Roboreader "Country Girl" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Come and Go, Molly Snow (Paperback)

This book is so hypnotic that, for the first time in my life, I missed my subway stop on my way home while reading it!

I would love to know what part of this book is true, if any. She writes it so realistically that it reads like a heart-breaking autobiography.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the rare stories that stays with you..., April 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Come and Go, Molly Snow (Paperback)

My women's book group read this over year ago, this story about a woman very unlike any of us, and yet we still refer to it in many discussions. Why? Because Carrie is, after all, very much like us in her motherhood and in her loss that most of us can only talk about if we preface it with "God forbid it should happen to any of us". The absolute sincerity of both her passions and her numbness are irresistible and her ultimate incremental steps toward recovery feel like a triumph for the reader as well.