Critics Rave

Gwen Raine is a woman you will instantly recognize: an attractive, thirtyish stay-at-home mom who lives in the kind of tranquil suburban community where the wives spend their days ferrying the kids to and from school and music lessons and nature camps and where the husbands work long, grueling hours at stressful white-collar jobs in order to maintain the upscale standard of living to which the whole family has become all-too-accustomed. It’s a milieu in which everything seems to be right—yet so much can go wrong.

The story of Clayton and Saford Hall is perhaps the ultimate country-music brother saga of all….[I]n their heyday the Hall twins were regional stars in their little neck of the woods in southwest Virginia, until World War II killed their professional music careers and nearly themselves as well. “Do not expect a tale of sorry old men reminiscing about the good old days,” author Ralph Berrier warns. “This is the adventure of young men, two brothers born pitiful and raised hard, who made beautiful things out of raw God-given talents. . . . I think of them as they appear in their own stories: vibrant, happy, strong.”