'Remarkably, as in Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist, the unconventional, morally troubling relationships at the core of Jones' Silver Sparrow illustrate nothing if not the universality of the human quest for acknowledgment, legitimacy, love and loyalty. 'Set on its forced trajectory, the novel piles revelation on revelation, growing increasingly histrionic and less believable.' - Publishers Weekly 'Highly recommended for all, but especially for readers of women's fiction and African American women writers.' - Library Journal 'Jones beautifully evokes Atlanta in the 1980s while creating gritty, imperfect characters whose pain lingers in the reader's heart.' - Kirkus Reviews

As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters - the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle - she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another's lives.Īt the heart of it all are the two lives at stake, and like the best writers - think Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye - Jones portrays the fragility of these young girls with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women, just not as their mothers. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families - the public one and the secret one. With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, 'My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,' author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle.

Silver sparrow by tayari jones