Populating this absorbing novel is a vivid cast of characters, each with his own story. The secret, it appears, will have its day. As the girls head toward their senior year of high school and then college, Dana’s behavior becomes more risky.

She wants to check out the appliances in the kitchen, to see who has the better stove - her mother or Chaurisse’s. Dana becomes a specter in Chaurisse’s life, much as Chaurisse was in Dana’s for all those years.Īnd Dana grows more and more brazen, once walking into Chaurisse’s mother’s beauty shop, ostensibly to have her lustrous hair cut off but really to get inside the Witherspoon home. Brilliantly, Jones allows us to hear about the encounter from the girl who doesn’t know the whole truth. “My dad smokes two packs a day,” one of the girls says shortly after they meet. The first time the girls meet, while shoplifting in a drugstore, Chaurisse thinks her unknown sister is a “Barbie doll dipped in chocolate.” If Chaurisse befriends Dana, she hopes, maybe some of the “shine” will rub off on her. who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar” - this according to Chaurisse, who, alas, is ordinary brown, with a hairpiece. Dana is a “silver girl,” one of those “natural beauties. The effect is subtly devastating when Dana begins to intrude upon Chaurisse’s narrative, deepening the reader’s interest we understand it’s just a matter of time before the unknown becomes the known. Jones gives us almost all of Dana’s story in part one, then all of Chaurisse’s in part two. While other writers might have chosen a back-and-forth narrative - first Dana, then Chaurisse, then Dana, etc. Chaurisse Witherspoon, who spends a lot of time in her mother’s beauty parlor, believes she has a normal family. Dana Yarboro knows the truth and feels she is a secret. Tayari Jones, author of the novels “ Leaving Atlanta” and “ The Untelling,” has chosen an unusual structure to reveal her story of two African American teenage girls sharing the same father in the same Georgia town. Which family does the man love most? The family to whom he confides everything, thus hurting it in the process? Or the family to whom he tells nothing, allowing it to live in ignorant normality, but always with the possibility of a terrible surprise? One knows about the other the other doesn’t.

Silver sparrow tayari jones review