Harpsong: Volume 1

By Rilla Askew

Book Overview

Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt. In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan's search for home-all set to the sounds of Harlan's harmonica.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806139285
• ISBN13: 9780806139289
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

A story of how love can survive even in the worst of times

Oklahoma, like much of the Midwest, was suffering from drought and the Depression, when Sharon saw Harlan Singer coming up the road. He was looking for work, but he wasn't much of a worker. Dark-haired, green-eyed and possessing a certain charm, fourteen-year-old Sharon was quickly smitten, as was he with this naive young girl. Basically a good man, but one haunted by the past, he took Sharon from her family and married her. They lived on the road, riding the rails, thumbing rides, and were nearly always hungry. Harlan carried a harmonica and could coax from it music that spoke to people, and with his charm could make himself the leader he desired to be. He loved Sharon and she loved him, but the bride of a homeless man has no bed of roses to lie on. Harpsong is an excellent story, well written, and one that immerses the reader deep into the characters' lives. Eunice Boeve author of Ride a Shadowed Trail

What a story ~

Even though I'm from Oklahoma, reading this book is teaching me all kinds of new things about my state. . . and reminding me of many things I'd long forgotten. Truly enjoying the read (not quite finished yet).

Heartbreaking and Haunting

Rilla Askew writes about Oklahoma like no one else. In this novel, she perfectly captures the longing and despair, as well as the love and fragile thread of hope that keep Harlan Singer and his child bride Sharon moving, as they ride the rails, going nowhere during the hard days of the Depression. Askew's prose is lyrical (and every bit as good as Toni Morrison's and William Faulkner's) and resonates with beauty and pain. This novel will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

The rest of the story

Harpsong. The title sings as does the story. Sometimes disturbing as good people struggled during the Depression, Harpsong is an anthem to the human spirit. Harlan Singer, a wanderer like so many of that era, steals the hearts of the Thompson family and their daughter Sharon. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride are part of an odyssey with others riding rails, hitchhiking and all with no particular destination. Unlike Grapes of Wrath--a mostly incomplete account of Oklahoma during the Depression--Harpsong was written by a native Oklahoman, not a carpetbagger who never visited the locale written about. Rilla Askew tells a wonderful and desperate story of those who stayed behind to deal with their fate. As one unnamed speaker says: "The Joads wouldn't have left out from Sallisaw or anywhere else around here on account of tractors and dust. They might have left, but it wouldn't have been due to tractors and dust, no matter what some stranger might have wrote in a book. Truth is, some left, but most stayed, dumb as lambs to the slaughter maybe, but we were determined to live with the devil we knew. That devil wore a few different faces." With Harlan and Sharon, we live in hobo jungles, Hoovervilles and ride the rails in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the pinched middle. Always returning to Oklahoma, but never coming home, Sharon follows Harlan on his search for a somewhat mystical and mysterious friend. Along the way, Harlan Singer becomes another folk hero. Harpsong is a love story blended with history, folk tradition, adventure and renewal. The harshness of the times and the generosity of those with anything to share is also part of the story. It is a story of despair and perseverance, of love and brutality; a story of wayfaring orphans searching for home only to find there is no home to return to. It is a story of hard luck people struggling in hard times Oklahoma, of bank foreclosures and failing farms. It is a story of faith and endurance. Speaking to the Grapes of Wrath-created myths about Oklahoma, award-winning author Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story in Harpssong, a novel built on legend and historical event in Depression era Oklahoma. Drawing from newspaper accounts of events from this time period and her own Oklahoma heritage, Askew reveals that not everyone left Oklahoma with Steinbeck's Joad family and that many of Oklahoma's folk heroes grew out of this era. Author Rilla Askew was born and raised in Eastern Oklahoma and knows whereof she writes. She is the author of a collection of stories, Strange Business, which won the Oklahoma Book Award and two other award winning novels, The Mercy Seat and Fire in Beulah. For the rest of the story about Oklahoma's Depression years and its people, Harpsong tells it like it was. Harpsong, is the first in the Oklahoma Stories and Storytellers series to be published the OU Press.