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The Farewell Tour
The Farewell Tour: A Novel | Stephanie Clifford
4 posts | 3 read | 5 to read
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Rise, a rich and riveting novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle that tells the story of one unforgettable womans rise in country and western music. Its 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood. As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillians youththe Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashvilleand her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms. Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, shell undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story. Exploring one unforgettable womans creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a worldand an art formmade for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind.
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review
Kimberlone
The Farewell Tour: A Novel | Stephanie Clifford
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Mehso-so

I really wanted to love this book, but despite the topic being of interest, I really disliked the main character and that kind of ruined it for me. It‘s one thing to portray a complicated female character, but Lillian is so horrible and insensitive to the people around her that nothing about the trauma she‘s experienced can excuse her behavior (which she only recognizes as problematic in the last 20% of the book).

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CSeydel
The Farewell Tour: A Novel | Stephanie Clifford
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Man, it was a tough call this month - I read a slew of powerful, entertaining, and well-written fiction books in May!

🏆 Honorable mentions 🏆
Small Mercies, Dennis Lehane
Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal
The Bandit Queens, Parini Shroff
The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis

The award goes to🥁
Stephanie Clifford‘s The Farewell Tour!
I laughed, I cried, I gasped in shock, I stayed up past bedtime. Water Lil‘s story will stay with me a long time.

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CSeydel
The Farewell Tour: A Novel | Stephanie Clifford
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Pickpick

This story was so much more than I expected. The book centers on a 1980 “Farewell Tour” for has-been country singer Lillian Waters, determined to sweep back into her hometown as a celebrated icon and confront the lingering demons of her unhappy childhood. The book alternates between the “current” events of 1980 and Lil‘s life story beginning in 1930s rural Washington, which works well to build a picture of Lil as a person. Moving and lovely.

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GerardtheBookworm
Farewell Tour | Stephanie Clifford
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Pickpick

A fictional music bio of country superstar, Lillian Waters. From her humble beginnings of a farm girl in the Great Depression to being a struggling musician post-World War 2, this moving novel showcases the struggles of female country musicians go through breaking in a patriarchal industry and the expectations to stay relevant and at the top.