I expected this book to be a mellow story of Appalachia, and it was, but it was also a multi-generational tale with some suspense thrown in for good measure. The author was very good at whetting my appetite for what was going to happen next in one story line and then switching to events 200+ years earlier. Malcolm McCourry, by his own account, lives four distinct lives. Seamen seize him away from his first life on Islay, off the coast of Scotland, when he is nine years old, and he voyages to America, fulfilling an early prophecy that "the sea will take him." His tale alternates with that of his modern-day progeny, John Walker, a retired lawyer, and his estranged daughter Lark, who is making her name as a singer. The glue between the generations is a song called "The Rowan Stave" about a shepherdess receiving a magic stone in a graveyard. The main theme of the song, however, is that our journeys change us. Certainly this is the case with Malcolm, who brought the song from Scotland, and later with Lark, who is trying to resurrect it for her next album. Other songs play a role in the novel, including one that helps identify a murderer, but not as much as I expected. The supernatural actually is a larger player, with several benevolent ghosts and a family curse against the firstborn child, endured by Lark but seeming to be somewhat of her own making. There's actually another modern-day story line, that of Joe LeDonne, who's doing some soul searching on a backpacking trip. Certain events raise the possibility that his story is perhaps ten years later than Lark's, and McCrumb leaves us guessing about this timeline until the end.
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