Singer Sisters review: ‘gentle notes on the gritty business of making music’

By the end of Sarah Seltzer’s debut novel I could almost hear the music reverberating from the pages, performed by the talented, battle-scarred women at its heart. Judie and Sylvia Zingerman, two nice Jewish girls who become 1960s folk music stars, may be fictional, but in Seltzer’s hands I was desperate to listen to their music.

The book opens in the period in which Dylan was in the ascendant, although Seltzer creates her own folk ecosystem to allow her characters to forge their own paths. A teenage Judie runs off to Greenwich Village – and eventually success beckons. Along with the Singer Sisters, there’s Dave Cantor, a more experienced singer who eventually marries Judie, and Eamon Foley, an Irish musician with whom a brief encounter will shape her life for decades to come. And then, with the world at her feet, Judie breaks up the band.

A few decades on, we meet Emma Cantor, Dave and Judie’s daughter and an up-an-coming star of the 1990s Riot Girl scene. Defying her mother’s wishes for her to study first, she rushes head first into an industry that loves a redemption story; in this case the daughter picking up where the mother inexplicably left off. As Emma rises to fame, we follow two parallel plots to explore why Judie abruptly stopped performing, what her famous lyrics were really about, and the way in which two people’s recollection of events can radically differ.

That makes the book sounds soapier than it is, although Seltzer, an editor of Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, is adept at keeping readers hooked. This is more than chick lit, but it is not the high-drama stuff of other such novels, not least the recent bestseller Daisy Jones and the Six. Her writing is mellifluous and gentle; she takes her time over the traumatic moments (a cornucopia of unwanted pregnancies, addiction, infidelity, public shaming) and focuses on the grittier components of making music, rather than the bright lights of success. Judie, Sylvia and Emma are all characters and their personal challenges more complex than just sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Pleasingly, also, this is not a textbook story of younger Jews defying their forebears by following their art; the sisters’ father, Hyman, may be a respectable businessman, but he hosts troubadours and builds a home studio.

“The songs in that notebook were her ticket,” thinks a young Judie early on. Indeed – and a basis for a gorgeous novel that should be televised, if only for the soundtrack.