Saturday Review: “From Big Pine to Jazz: Making A Life With Pizzazz” a review by Rebecca Godwin in NCLR Online Winter 2024
Terry Roberts. The Sky Club (2022)
About Roberts’s fifth book, Godwin writes, “Rural and urban, old ways and new possibilities meet in the speakeasy and jazz club that gives the novel its name, shaping every aspect of this first-rate narrative of economic and cultural upheaval, risk, loss, and love.”
It’s particularly fitting Godwin, having served on the boards of both NC “Lit&Hist” and the Thomas Wolfe Society, reviews this novel. Her knowledge of Asheville itself shows in pointing out the:
“…myriad details that make The Sky Club an admirable historical novel blending actual places and figures with fictional characters. Now condominiums, the Sky Club edifice still stands atop Beaucatcher Mountain,
being so named when owners needed to conceal their German-American heritage in the name of their supper club in World War II. Jo shops with her cousin at Bon Marché, a famous store first owned by a Jewish man named Lipinsky, as the narrator explains. This landmark also survives in Asheville, now the site of the Haywood Park Hotel along with other businesses. Looking for a room after her uncle’s death, when the family must give up their ritzy house, Jo visits the Old Kentucky Home boarding house and meets owner Julia Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe’s mother and real estate investor.”
Read the entire review in the Online Winter 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org or your favorite independent bookseller.
