and the first half of the story tells the story from Dana and her mother’s perspective. The secret family of Dana and her mother have always known about Chaurisse and her mother Lauverne. I loved this story of Dana and Chaurisse, who are born just months apart yet are half sisters as a result of their fathers bigamy. “If I’d learned anything from my parents,” thinks Dana, “it was that the law didn’t understand anything about what passed between men and women.A stunning follow up to the deservedly widely lauded American Marriage. It’s another shade to the novel’s shrewd exploration of off-the-record relationships. When Dana touches it, Chaurisse feels “the way you feel when you go too far with a boy you don’t know so well”.īoth also date older men. The first thing each notices about the other is her hair – Dana’s is “waterfall hair” while Chaurisse has a synthetic weave.

Laverne, who owns a salon, tells Chaurisse there are two types of woman: natural beauties (Dana), versus “Pretty in a Jar” (Chaurisse).

There are parallels in the girls’ lives, like their preoccupation with beauty. By the time Dana slithers into Chaurisse’s narrative and befriends her, our sympathies are split between the two girls, both sad and likeable.īigamy is what gives the novel its dramatic impetus, but it’s the double coming-of-age story that gives it heart. It’s a clever structure for a simple story. Dana, who is fixated on “the way that things take place and in what order”, narrates the first half of the novel, Chaurisse the second.

With a set-up like this, it’s a matter of time before the truth comes out. Gwen and Dana, always second best, know about James’s other family Laverne and Chaurisse do not. It’s the mid-Eighties, and James, a chauffeur with a stutter, has an “official” wife and daughter, Laverne and Chaurisse, and a “secret” family, Gwen and Dana. Like An American Marriage, it’s set in Atlanta, where Jones is from. Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow has a superb opening: “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.” The novel, about two teenage girls caught in the middle of a complicated marital situation, came out in the US in 2011 and is now being published over here after the enormous success of An American Marriage, which won last year’s Women’s Prize (and a spot on Barack Obama’s reading list).

Silver sparrow tayari jones review