~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~
Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young brother of her former lover, and rescue him from his abusive father.
Things go south almost from the beginning. Jodi meets the needy, addictive Miranda in a motel; they slide into a relationship almost immediately, and Miranda convinces her to kidnap her three young sons who are being cared for by her ex, a washed-up country singer. They also pick up Ricky, who is by now a strange and quiet young man. The three adults and three children head on up to West Virginia, where Jodi grew up, to her grandmother’s old cabin on remote mountainous land.
Both dense and slow, this novel appears to have multiple aims: to show the odds stacked against long-time prisoners who are released; the complex homecoming of queer people into a conservative community; the relentless struggle to keep a family fed in an area with few jobs; the opioids, pills and other drugs proliferating across Appalachia; the beauty of the land; the destruction of that same land by fracking; tensions and jealousy within lesbian relationships; and West Virginians whose hard lives lead to early aging.
This is too much for the novel; it is weighted down by the many threads it is required to support, and no thread is explored with sufficient delicacy or depth. In addition, it moves back and forth between Jodi’s crew in the present, and Jodi’s past life that ended in the prison sentence.
The characters are not particularly empathetic. All of them have miserable histories and are struggling with poverty, addiction, or sexuality. Jodi, it turns out, had been imprisoned for shooting her girlfriend. Her quixotic attempt to rescue Ricky never seems very convincing. Miranda is a casual mother whose children seem no more than appendages and affirmation of her own needs; she abandons them without a second thought when drugs or other entertainment appear. Jodi’s brother Dennis immediately inveigles her into storing drugs, and is suspicious of the relationship between her and Miranda.
“Hey”, he said, looking straight at Jodi. “You and Miranda got some kind of sick shit going on up here?”
Jodi froze.
There was a flint edge to Dennis’s voice that buried itself deep inside Jodi.
“No”, she whispered, the word coming out before she even had time to think, a slap of a reaction that left her dull and defeated. She hated that this was her first response and tried to tell herself that she only wanted privacy, but there was something else there, the scent of self-hatred as ripe and familiar as her own shit.
“I can’t stand to think of those boys growing up around something sick like that.”
The writing is punchy and pointed, as seen above, and with a tighter, leaner plot, could have been more powerful.
Perhaps more puzzling than the many storylines is what is left out. Jodi’s attempts to fit back into her community might have been a story in itself, but there are huge gaps: 18 years in prison, but she appears to notice few changes in the world between 1989 and 2007. Having spent her days in cells and prison yard, she has no trouble driving a car, looking after small children, or handling medical crises using homegrown remedies. Additional threads lead nowhere:
Frances had filled out the empty corners of Jodi’s days with her easy laughter and bright eyes, and it was not until it had already started that Jodi had realized they were dating.
Frances is never mentioned again, and Jodi seems to have no interest in finding her.
There are occasionally evocative sentences about the land:
Route 3 wound in from the south end of the county toward Lewisville, where the ridges dropped back and the Milk River valley opened wide, the jagged paths of ancient icebergs visible in the huge boulders, tipped as if still in midmotion.
The author’s affection for the mountains of Appalachia comes through, but unfortunately the overloaded plot is not enough to sustain the reader through this novel.
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