PERRYSBURG— Gathering Volumes, an independent bookstore, together with Six Fifths Distilling invite you to join internationally bestselling author of “The Atomic City Girls” and “The Ballad of Laurel Springs,” Janet Beard, for the paperback launch of “The Ballad of Laurel Springs,” which sets the resonant violence of family secrets to the music of the mountains. Some of the music imbued in the novel will be performed at the event.
Registration for this in-person event on Monday at 6:30 p.m. is limited. Tickets are $40 and include a copy of “The Ballad of Laurel Springs,” food and drink, as well as the song performance, and book discussion.
Beard’s new novel tells the alluring story of multiple generations of women in one East Tennessee family haunted by violence and redeemed by their rich inheritance of folk music.
Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation — to be careful of men, and desire — are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folksongs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them always to know their place — or risk the wages of sin.
