Book Review: Tied to the Tracks by Rosina Lippi

I am so excited to write this book review because I absolutely loved Tied to the Tracks. The synopsis of the story doesn’t really sound all that exciting: documentary company (Tied to the Tracks of the title) from New Jersey is selected to do the documentary of a famous southern writer, Ms. Zula May Bragg, in Ogilvie, GA. The catch is that the head of the documentary company, Angie, and the department chair of the college where the famous writer is a teacher, John, were once lovers, and John is engaged to be married to the youngest sister of the other rich family in the town.

That said, the story was very exciting, fun to read, and enjoyable in all the right ways. The tension between John and Angie is so tight that the book fairly tingles with it. It reminded me of the beginning of Into the Wilderness, Lippi’s first novel in the Wilderness series written under the pseudonym of Sara Donati. When Nathaniel and Elizabeth are trying to fall in love while also trying not to fall in love, they were sparking off of every surface in the novel. Likewise, this tension is finely wrought in TTTT.

What I absolutely love about Lippi/Donati’s work is her sense of language. She captures the cadence and rhythm of language in a way that makes the conversations and thoughts of the characters “sound” in your head. The telephone conversation between Tony Russo (one of the filmmakers) and his mother in New Jersey was a delight to read. I was also excited to see that Lippi accurately placed the origin of Frito Pie in East Texas. It’s little details like this that make the world she built in Ogilvie, GA, feel as hot, humid, and muggy as it would be if it were a real town just an hour outside of Savannah. (Though I did find myself wondering if I ever use “you all” when referring to a group of people other than to give them a command: “you all get on out of here”—but that issue is so minor that it hardly bears mentioning.)

I know that a book I am reading strikes a chord with me when I start to have conversations with the characters and imagine what they would do in my world. The characters in TTTT came to life for me, and I had imaginary conversations with them all week. I am going to miss them now that I’ve read the book and have to place it back on my bookshelf.