The Sky Club
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award“When I’m dead and buried . . . you get the hell out of here . . . Make a life somewhere else . . . a life that I can’t even imagine.” Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town.
When the Great Depression brings Central Bank & Trust down in a seismic crash, Jo is forced to find a new home and job. She finds both at the Sky Club, where she strikes a partnership with the alluring Arrowood as she is drawn deeper into a glamorous and precarious life of bootlegging, jazz, and love.
The Sky Club is the story of money, greed, and life after the crash from the eyes of one remarkable woman as she creates her own imagined life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts (My Mistress' Eyes Are Raven Black) centers his lackluster latest on a woman whose facility with numbers enables her to make a meaningful career for herself. In 1929, 26-year-old Jo Salter's mother, Mary, dies from measles. Jo, following her mother's wishes, leaves their insular community of Big Pine Valley, N.C., for Asheville, where she lands a position as a teller at her uncle's bank. Salter's diligence and comfort with math makes her a valued asset, able to easily notice discrepancies in banking records and to reconcile them wherever possible. Those attributes catch the notice of her superiors just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 begins to impact her employer and community. As Salter becomes more confident in her work, she hooks up with a flatly drawn handsome bad boy, Levi Arrowood, owner of a speakeasy. That relationship has its predictable vicissitudes before Roberts concludes with an equally predictable resolution. Meanwhile, the author's odd choice to present some, but not all, of the dialogue in transcript lends the narrative a choppy feel. Readers are likely to be left wanting.
