Sugar Run
Mesha Maren, 2019
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616206215
Summary
On the far side the view was nothing but ridgelines, the craggy silhouettes rising up against the night sky like the body of some dormant god. Jodi felt her breath go tight in her chest. This road went only one way, it seemed, in under the mountains until you were circled.
In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison for manslaughter. She’s released eighteen years later and finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom.
Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends.
There, she will meet and fall in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a new home and fresh start. But what do you do with a town and a family that refuses to change?
Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a run at another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how no matter the distance we think we’ve traveled from the mistakes we’ve made, too often we find ourselves standing precisely in the place we began. (From the publisher.)