Fiddler's Dream: A Novel Book

In deceptively simple prose mirroring the understatement of bluegrass music, Fiddler's Dream tells the story of a young musician of prodigious talent who pursues his dream of becoming one of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Boys as he tracks the whereabouts of his missing musician father.

Author Biography: GREGORY SPATZ is the author of the novel No One But Us and a story collection, Wonderful Tricks. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Iowa Review, and New England Review. The recipient of a Michener Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Washington State Book Award, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Spatz plays the fiddle in the acclaimed bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds.

Publishers Weekly

The dream of becoming a Bluegrass Boy in Bill Monroe's band prompts a 19-year-old Vermont fiddler to head to Nashville in Spatz's limpid, earnest second novel (after No One but Us), set in the near past. Jesse Alison was eight when his father, an itinerant guitar player and songwriter, left for the last time and headed South. Gifted and determined as a boy, Jesse excelled at the fiddle (as well as guitar and mandolin), encouraged by Genny, the owner of a local violin repair shop who eventually moved the place to Nashville. When Jesse arrives in Nashville, he looks up Genny, a lesbian now in her late 30s, but is crushed by the news that Monroe is in the hospital (he died in real life in 1996), his best playing behind him. Jesse stays at Genny's house, helps her in the shop and jams at the local Station Inn in the evenings with older and better players. But unfinished family business drives Jesse to seek out his father, now born again with a new wife and daughter, and it is their poignant reunion set to music that redeems this folksy narrative from a deliberative lassitude. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.