Somebody Everybody Listens To (review)

Retta has a big voice and big dreams: as soon as she graduates high school, she's leaving her small town of Starling, Tennessee, for Nashville to pursue her goal of being a singer. Encouraged by her best friend and a boy she's crushing on, she borrows her great-aunt's car, and she's off. Things don't go smoothly, but she manages, through the kindness of a tow-truck driver working out his repentance for a less-than-admirable past, to find a steady job and a place to stay while she sings at an all-but-abandoned motel lounge. There, she meets a crotchety bartender with just the right advice, and she perseveres despite setbacks that ultimately deepen her spirit and resolve. Retta is a thoroughly credible, thoroughly likable character—loyal, hardworking, and utterly ordinary, except for her exceptional talent. She's done her homework on the bios of her favorite country singers, which are included as interstitial factoids between chapters, and which make her own path seem reasonable and realistic. Her reflection on her parents' relationship, which falls apart when she leaves, proceeds along a thoughtful track from a relatively immature blame game to a more complex understanding of the ways in which both she and her father have not attended to what her mother cared about, an insight that is subtly related to the reasons behind her determination to pursue her own dreams. Her narrative voice is as solid as her singing voice is portrayed to be, making her story compulsively readable and ultimately inspiring.