RIVER, SING OUT
BY
JAMES WADE
Categories: Contemporary / Literary Fiction
Rural Fiction / Crime Fiction / Coming-of-Age
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Blackstone Facebook Twitter Instagram
Date of Publication: June 8, 2021
Number of Pages: 315 pages
“And through these ages untold, the river did act as the lifeblood of all those things alongside it.”
Jonah Hargrove is celebrating his thirteenth birthday by avoiding his abusive father, when a girl named River stumbles into his yard, injured and alone. The teenager has stolen thousands of dollars worth of meth from her murderous, drug-dealing boyfriend, but lost it somewhere in the Neches River bottoms during her escape. Jonah agrees to help her find and sell the drugs so she can flee East Texas.
Chasing after them is John Curtis, a local drug kingpin and dogfighter, as well as River’s boyfriend, the dangerous Dakota Cade.
Each person is keeping secrets from the others—deadly secrets that will be exposed in violent fashion as all are forced to come to terms with their choices, their circumstances, and their own definition of God.
With a colorful cast of supporting characters and an unflinching violence juxtaposed against lyrical prose, River, Sing Out dives deep into the sinister world of the East Texas river bottoms, where oppressive poverty is pitted against the need to believe in something greater than the self.
Blackstone Publishing ║ Amazon ║Books-a-Million
Indie Bound ║ Downpour ║ Hudson Booksellers
Praise
”With echoes of Jim Harrison, Cormac McCarthy (and perhaps a smidge of Flannery O’Connor), River, Sing Out is a beautiful, brutal meditation on survival and love in the face of nearly unspeakable violence and depravity in an East Texas community ravaged by the meth trade. Taut, lyrical, and precise, the prose soars in this important new novel by James Wade.” —Elizabeth Wetmore, New York Times bestselling author of Valentine
”If you read one novel this year, make it this one. James Wade’s River, Sing Out, is an instant classic filled with characters that will break your heart, lyrical prose as haunted as the river it evokes, and a Southern Noir undertow that wholly sucks you in and keeps you turning the pages until it’s searing, masterful conclusion.” —May Cobb, author of The Hunting Wives
”Wade, whose striking debut, All Things Left Wild (2020), traveled back a century in Texas history, uses an unlikely friendship to explore an equally wild present-day landscape…A haunting fable of an impossible relationship fueled by elemental need and despair.” —Kirkus Reviews
River, Sing Out – Book Trailer from AV FILMS on Vimeo.
If I could only use one word to describe this book, I think it would be poetic. The words flow seamlessly from one subject to another and the imagery fits East Texas to a T.
There are several plots in this story that meld together. There is a young boy, Jonah, that is just trying to survive despite abject poverty. River, a young woman that has lost her way but is determined to find her path, and John Curtis and Cade, local drug dealers and thugs who believe they are above the law. This novel is gritty and while has some happy moments, shows us the true underbelly of the drug world and the ruthlessness of those involved.
“How much of this life is truly your choice?”
This line resonated with me because I believe that we all make choices in our lives. Those choices may not always be the right ones, but every situation can be a learning experience. Of course, there are people and circumstances that create situations not of our choosing or making, but those are the times that one can learn from it and I think that is what happens with River and Jonah at different times throughout the book.
“You’ve made yourself the world’s victim and you’ll do the same with this.”
Jonah may be just 13, but he has seen a lot in his young life. His mother left him and his father is not a kind man. Plus his living situation isn’t wonderful but thankfully there is the kindness of a neighbor that looks out for him and gives him food when Jonah visits. This may be Jonah’s saving grace in life from a horrible life and abusive father. Jonah realizes that he wants more from life than what he has and seeks to find a better life for himself.
“He was her lifeline in so many ways. And he was kind to her. More kind than any human had ever been.”
I think my favorite character might have been River. She realized (albeit a bit too late perhaps) that a life wrapped up with drugs and thugs may not be the best for her. There was quite a little twist near the end that was quite the surprise. Her life was possibly never going to be all her own. However, her time with Jonah helped her see the good in people and strive harder to change her circumstances.
“We all come to appreciate those things lost to us. The sweetest breath of the day not realized until the night. Such is our reckoning as men. And how do you keep going, when something so meaningful is taken from you? How do you move forward? How do you move at all?”
This introspective quote gave me a lot to ponder. We all have losses in our lives and it is the hope for a better tomorrow that keeps us moving forward. I think that is what River and Jonah discover in their short time together. There is even a moment for John Curtis where I thought that he might want to change his life but it might have been too late for him.
This book will paint a picture of a world many of us are not subjected to but it gives us a glimpse into the lives of these characters and how they adapt and adjust to what life has thrown at them. The ending is both sad and joyful at the same time.
We give this book 4 paws up.
James Wade lives and writes in the Texas Hill Country with his wife and daughter. He is the author of All Things Left Wild, which is a winner of the 2016 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest, a winner of the 2021 Spur Award for Best Historical Fiction, and a winner of the 2021 Reading the West Award for Best Debut Novel. His fiction has appeared in various literary journals and magazines.
Website ║ Facebook ║ Blog
Instagram ║ YouTube ║ Goodreads ║ Twitter
GIVEAWAY! GIVEAWAY! GIVEAWAY!
TWO WINNERS
Two winners each receive an autographed first-edition
hardcover copy of River, Sing Out
+ an autographed paperback copy of
multiple award-winning All Things Left Wild.
(US only. Ends midnight, CDT, June 18, 2021)
Visit the Lone Star Literary Life Tour Page
For direct links to each post on this tour,
or visit the blogs below
| 6/8/21 | Book Trailer | Texas Book Lover |
| 6/8/21 | BONUS Promo | LSBBT Blog |
| 6/9/21 | Review | The Clueless Gent |
| 6/9/21 | Review | Rainy Days with Amanda |
| 6/10/21 | Top Five | All the Ups and Downs |
| 6/10/21 | BONUS Promo | Hall Ways Blog |
| 6/11/21 | Author Interview | Book Fidelity |
| 6/11/21 | Review | StoreyBook Reviews |
| 6/12/21 | Review | It’s Not All Gravy |
| 6/13/21 | Excerpt | Reading by Moonlight |
| 6/14/21 | Review | That’s What She’s Reading |
| 6/14/21 | Audio Review | Forgotten Winds |
| 6/15/21 | Review | Book Bustle |
| 6/16/21 | Author interview | The Page Unbound |
| 6/16/21 | Review | Librariel Book Adventures |
| 6/17/21 | Audio Review | Chapter Break Book Blog |
| 6/17/21 | Review | Jennie Reads |
tour services provided by
Covey and JayJay travel to China and then return home to deal with shady characters, spies, gangsters, and other tough customers. In an exciting last act, they solve a murder most foul.
Shelton L. Williams (Shelly) is founder and president of the Osgood Center for International Studies in Washington, DC. He holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and he taught for nearly 40 years at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He has served in the US Government on 4 occasions and he has written books and articles on nuclear proliferation. In 2004 he began a new career of writing books on crime and society. Those books are Washed in the Blood, Summer of 66, and now Covey Jencks. All firmly prove that he is still a Texan at heart.
He’s a cop trying to stop a serial bomber. And she’ll stop at nothing to clear her own name.
Bestseller Kelly Irvin is the author of 28 books, including romantic suspense and Amish romance. Publishers Weekly called Closer Than She Knows “a briskly written thriller.” The Library Journal said of her novel Tell Her No Lies, “a complex web with enough twists and turns to keep even the savviest romantic suspense readers guessing until the end.” The two-time ACFW Carol Award finalist worked as a newspaper reporter for six years on the Texas-Mexico border. Those experiences fuel her romantic suspense novels set in Texas. A retired public relations professional, Kelly now writes fiction full-time. She lives with her husband professional photographer Tim Irvin in San Antonio. They have two children, three grandchildren, and two ornery cats.
In 2006, the author’s brother, Steve Sirois, was sentenced to serve 35 years in a Texas prison for a horrendous crime, aggravated sexual assault of a child — a crime Steve swore he didn’t commit. After the conviction, Michael started helping Steve write his appeals, but what he saw in the trial transcripts made him question how a jury could have convicted his brother based on that testimony.
Michael Sirois was reading by the age of four and was writing quirky short stories by the third grade. In high school, he added acting to his bag of tricks. After graduating from the University of Houston, he taught writing, drama, and technology in the middle school trenches for two decades, but continued to act and write, placing well in competitions like the Writer’s Digest Short Story contest and the HBO Project Greenlight series. His first novel, The Jagged Man, was published in 2015, and a two-book series, If a Butterfly, is slated to be published in late-Spring 2021.
He’s bound and determined to find peace . . . but she’s about to stir things up.
All the Cowboys Ain’t Gone is the rollicking adventure story of Lincoln Smith, a young Texan living at the beginning of the twentieth century, who thinks of himself as the last true cowboy. He longs for the days of the Old West, when men like his father, a famous Texas Ranger, lived by the chivalric code. Lincoln finds himself hopelessly out of time and place in the fast-changing United States of the new century. When he gets his heart broken by a sweetheart who doesn’t appreciate his anachronistic tendencies, he does what any sensible young romantic would do: he joins the French Foreign Legion. On his way to an ancient and exotic country at the edge of the Sahara, Lincoln encounters a number of curious characters and strange adventures, from a desert hermit who can slow up time to a battle with a crocodile cult that worships the god of death. He meets them all with his own charming brand of courage and resourcefulness.
Though John J. Jacobson didn’t join the French Foreign Legion after being jilted by a girlfriend, or over his displeasure of missing the last great cattle drive, he has, borrowing Churchill’s phrase, lived a rather variegated life. He was born in Nevada, grew up in the West, surfed big waves in Hawaii, circled the world thrice, survived the sixties and seventies, corporate America, and grad school. Among other degrees he has an MA in Renaissance literature from Claremont Graduate University.
The seemingly never-ending Cabinda War (1975—) has left multitudes dead in its wake and thousands of children homeless and orphaned.
BJ Mayo was born in an oil field town in Texas. He spent the first few years of his life living in a company field camp twenty-five miles from the closest town. His career in the energy industry took him to various points in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Louisiana, Bangladesh, Australia, and Angola West Africa. He and his wife were high school sweethearts and have been married for forty-six years with two grown children. They live on a working farm near San Angelo, Texas.
A Mixtape of Big ‘80s Style, High School Angst, and a Classic Jane Austen Tale
Allison Pittman is an award-winning author of thirteen novels, including the Christy-nominated Sister Wife series and the critically acclaimed The Seamstress. An enthusiast for all of the writing world, Allison holds active leadership in her local American Christian Fiction Writers chapter, and she heads up a thriving critique group in the San Antonio area.
“Whoever controls the flow of the money supply, irrespective of whether it’s fiat or gold currency is the one to fear.” 
