The Evolution of the Gospelettes tells the story of a gifted family in a rapidly changing world, as older faith is challenged by more inclusive belief. This is Appalachian storytelling at its best and truest, where loyalty and love endure and prevail.
~Robert Morgan, author of Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe
The litmus test for a great novel is this: the reader who begins its first page is different from the person who finishes its last page. Tammy Oberhausen achieves exactly that in The Evolution of the Gospelettes. Like the Holliman family of musicians, especially Jeannie Holliman—singer, songwriter, and bandleader—readers will be profoundly changed for the better by this unforgettable and irresistible story.
~Lorraine M. López, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories
Your heart will raise to the sky a psalm of thanksgiving for this gift of a book, a heart-gripping chronicle of a family's fraught journey through time, travail, faith, and enduring love, on a river of song.
~Jeff Zentner, award-winning author of Colton Gentry's Third Act
Nuanced, funny, and hugely entertaining look at faith, doubt, hypocrisy, and holiness.... A remarkable debut.
~Silas House, author of Lark Ascending: A Novel
Oberhausen writes with such fierce, tender regard for her characters, even for—especially for—the broken ones. At turns sweeping and intimate, ambitious and unassuming, The Evolution of the Gospelettes is a brilliant debut.
~Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Salt Line
I can't remember when I've enjoyed reading a new novel so much! Filled with music, food, and love, The Evolution of the Gospelettes is an absolutely irresistible novel—so smart, so warm and wise and knowledgeable. Through the universal metaphor of music, it tells more about our changing region than any book I have read in years. I literally couldn't put it down. I couldn't stop reading to cook supper! The Evolution of the Gospelettes joins some mighty good company to become one of the very finest Appalachian novels ever written—and certainly one of the most original, comprehensive and compelling.
~Lee Smith, author of Silver Alert
Piercing, entertaining.... In the poignant novel The Evolution of the Gospelettes, a daughter's faith is deconstructed but not extinguished as she works to glorify God.
~Foreword Reviews
Oberhausen depicts a vivid and disarming portrait of churches and their transformation from the old-school house of prayer of the 1970s, to 1980s televangelism, and eventually to the megachurches of the 1990s.... Oberhausen shines an acute lens on the inner workings of the church, finding duplicity, insincerity, and doubt along with spirituality, faith, and holiness, and asks us to examine the true meaning of religious beliefs.
~Booklist
