Kay Sloan
Reviews
The Patron Saint of Red Chevys
"Mississippi, 1964: Bernice Starling, a blues singer of some repute, is stabbed to death.
Her two young daughters decide they want to find the killer, but it's a tricky job, and there are
plenty of suspects: a local bigot, their mother's lover, a random passerby, even their own father.
This isn't the first novel to feature a teenage amateur sleuth, but neither Jubilee Starling nor her
sister, Charlene, is likely to be mistaken for Nancy Drew, and this Mississippi town with its racially
charged atmosphere sure isn't River Heights. In the end, it doesn't matter whodunit, because this
isn't really a mystery novel at all. It's a family drama, the coming-of-age story of two young girls
who lose their mother and decide to do something about it. Fresh, enticing, often elegantly written."
—David Pitt, Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.
"The changes caused by events and the impossibility of reversing those changes are the themes of Kay Sloan's atmospheric novel set in 1960s Mississippi. Early one morning, Bernice Starling, a onetime blues singer, is murdered in her pickup, leaving behind a husband and two daughters. Later that same day, local TV weatherman Levi Litvak is killed in a fiery one-car crash. Soon, rumors begin to fly: Levi and Bernice had been lovers; Levi ended both of their lives when Bernice broke it off.
"The ramifications of Bernice's murder fall hard on her family. And for years, the rumors
continue, some of them racially charged. Bernice's younger daughter, Jubilee, inherits her mother's
red Chevy truck but refuses to wash away the memory of her mother in the blood on the seats, instead
draping bath towels over them like slipcovers. But eventually, Jubilee decides to escape the lingering
memories of her mother's death by applying herself at school and making plans to attend college far away,
at Berkeley. Will a simple change in geography make things better? As Jubilee tells her boyfriend,
'I'll always be different because of what happened to my mother.' The truth of her mother's life is just
a small part of this beautifully written story, which follows Jubilee's wrenching search -- simply for a way out."
—The Barnes & Noble Review
from Discover Great New Writers
(Fall 2004 Selection)
Worry Beads
Set in the small Mississippi town of Libertyburg, this quiet richly evocative novel
follows the closely knit families of brothers Fred and Chester Bloomer and their wives,
Winnie and Virginia, from 1942 until 1987. Chester's movie camera, purchased in 1942,
begins to capture important family events, and the author's lyrical prose casts a spell
over these milestones: the 1945 victory parade in downtown Libertyburg; a neighborhood
costume party, with Virginia wearing a suggestive grass skirt; a family Christmas;
vacations, and a wedding. But what is happening behind the masks of the participants?
Sloan deftly delineates the concealed frustrations, rage and jealousy that lead to an
affair between Virginia and Fred, and to Fred's mounting depression. Somehow the camera
is lost by Fred daughter (in an unintegrated yet electric episode) and Chester unwittingly
misplaces the canister in which the movies are stored. When the film turns up 20 years
later, faded, brittle and shadowy, Chester gives it to his son-in-law, a Hollywood film
editor, to restore, and plans are made to show it at the next family reunion. As the layers
of deception are peeled away slowly, each family member must make a compromise with the past.
This is a delicate, finely wrought effort."
—Publisher's Weekly