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Summary
Summary
In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she's sentenced to life in prison. When she's released eighteen years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. 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 meets and falls 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 fresh start. But what do you do with your past-and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or 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 break for 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 in precisely the place we began.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Maren's impressive debut is replete with luminous prose that complements her cast of flawed characters. Jailed in 1989 at 17 for shooting her girlfriend, Paula, Jodi McCarty is 35 when she begins her life as an adult on the outside. Jodi is temporarily thrown off course after her release when she meets Miranda, an unmoored addict living in a motel. Jodi falls for Miranda, and they become romantically involved and take Miranda's three children to West Virginia, away from Miranda's soon-to-be-ex-husband. But Jodi's ultimate goal is to find Paula's younger brother, Ricky, and convince him to move with her to her home in West Virginia. When she locates Ricky, now a grown man, he agrees to accompany them. Throughout the course of the novel, Maren reveals Jodi's relationship with Paula (as well as more details about her murder) and how they traveled across the country, gambling and doing drugs. After reaching the mountain cabin and trying to keep Miranda stable, Jodi realizes her beautiful retreat is an overgrown property owned by someone living in another state and fracking is getting closer. Maren astutely captures Jodi's desperation in trying to unite a family despite her past. (Jan.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In Maren's darkly engrossing debut novel, two women yearning for freedom fall in love, but the secrets of the past and betrayals in the present threaten to crush them.Jodi McCarty and Miranda Matheson have one thing in common from the get-go: They both made lousy choices in love as teenagers. Jodi paid for hers with an 18-year prison sentence, which ends as the novel begins. Miranda, still in her 20s, has just fled her unhappy marriage to a washed-up country music star. The two women meet in a bar in a tiny Georgia town, and Jodi is immediately smitten with pretty, charismatic Miranda. For her part, Miranda recognizes someone who can help herand whom she can manipulate. She needs help spiriting her three young sons away from her husband, while Jodi needs Miranda's car to rescue the brother of her lost first love from an abusive home (although that brother is much changed from the kid she remembers). Soon the whole bunch of them are heading for an isolated West Virginia farm that Jodi inherited from her grandmother, the one place in the world she feels at home. Maren draws them, and the reader, into a world of shifting allegiances, small-town bigotry, draining poverty, pervasive substance abuse, and secrets as destructive as the blasts used in fracking on the property down the road from the farm. The author skillfully handles a dual plot, alternating chapters set in the near-present and 20 years before. The novel's noir tone and taut suspense are enriched by Maren's often lovely prose, especially in descriptions of the natural world, and sharp observations, like this one of Jodi's first love: "There is a velocity to her that pulls you close. Her life lived like the coil before the strike."This impressive first novel combines beautifully crafted language and a steamy Southern noir plot to fine effect. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jodi emerges from a Georgia prison in 2007, having spent half of her 35 years there. Scrapping her way home to West Virginia, where she must immediately appear for a parole hearing, she crosses paths with Miranda, an alluring and carefree-seeming younger woman who's nonetheless just as reticent as Jodi about sharing the circumstances that brought her, penniless and alone, to the same roadside motel. Before long, Jodi, Miranda, Miranda's three young sons, and a man connected to Jodi's life-altering, teenage crime are headed to the abandoned mountaintop log cabin where Jodi grew up despite the fact that the land no longer belongs to her family, and the new threat of fracking is rising on all sides. A secondary narrative takes places in 1989, as Jodi falls in love with the woman who will be her undoing. Dread and a lush natural world infuse Maren's noir-tinged debut as she carefully relays soul-crushing realities and myths of poverty and privilege, luck and rehabilitation, and the human needs that can precede criminality through love-starved loner Jodi and her band of fellow hungry souls.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SUGAR RUN, by Mesha Maren. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An ex-convict returns to her Appalachian roots in this debut novel. The literary lineages here are hard-boiled fiction and film noir - but by exploring place, connection and redemption in the face of the justice system, Maren creates bold takes on those venerable genres. ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: The Graphic Adaptation, adapted by Ari Folman. Illustrated by David Polonsky. (Pantheon, $24.95.) By turning the famous diary of a girl hiding from the Nazis into a graphic novel, Folman and Polonsky bring out its wit and humor in whimsical illustrations capturing Anne's rich imaginative life. REVOLUTION SUNDAY, by Wendy Guerra. Translated by Achy Obejas. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) This Cuban novel, about a poet facing political and personal questions amid the loosening grip of socialism, plays with expectations; as often as Guerra gives a concrete description of Havana, she gives one that dances and evades. GHOST WALL, by Sarah Moss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) This compact, riveting novel, about a 17-year-old working-class girl forced by her parents to join a re-enactment of Iron Age Britain, asks us to question our complicity in violence, particularly against women. MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. (Doubleday, $22.95.) Murders litter this debut novel by a young Nigerian writer, but the book is less about crime than about the complexities of sibling bonds, as well as the way two sisters manage to survive in a corrupt city that suffocates women at every turn. THE BREAKTHROUGH: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, by Charles Graeber. (Twelve, $28.) Training the body's immune system to fight disease now offers the most promising developments in the effort to battle cancer. Graeber recounts the treatment's 19th-century origins and provides a panoramic view of the work being done today to make it effective. TODDLER-HUNTING: And Other Stories, by Taeko Kono. Translated by Lucy North, with an additional translation by Lucy Lower. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) As nonchalantly as some authors might describe a character's hair, Kono details her characters' taboo desires. First published in the '60s, these stories all retain interest. WE ARE DISPLACED: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World, by Malala Yousafzai. (Little, Brown, $18.99; ages 12 and up.) The world's youngest Nobel laureate gathers stirring stories of displacement from nine other girls. A THOUSAND SISTERS: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II, by Elizabeth Wein. (Balzer + Bray, $19.99; ages 13 and up.) The powerful tale of the all-female Soviet air regiments who flew 24,000 missions to help defeat the Nazis. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
It's 2007 and Jodi's just been released early from prison after serving 18 years for killing her girlfriend, Paula. Jodi is 35 and has spent her entire adult life behind bars. As soon as she leaves prison, she decides to redeem herself by rescuing Paula's abused younger brother, Ricky. On her way to find him, she meets and falls for the ethereal Miranda, mother of three young boys and prolific popper of pills. Jodi lures all five of them to rural West Virginia where she promises them sanctuary on her grandmother's land and swears to care for them all. Except, as it turns out, the land isn't hers, Miranda and her children need more than Jodi can give, Ricky is a troubled man, Jodi's family are bad news, and Jodi can't find a job with a felony conviction on her record. She fights to keep it all together while everything slips out of control. Maren builds a sleepy yet desperate world filled with uncertainty and sorrow. Pacing of the narrative is slow and uneventful, but sometimes very lyrical. Hillary Huber's narration, while extremely well done, is languid, making the plot to feel almost lethargic at times. VERDICT Fans of The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers may enjoy this debut.--Terry Ann Lawler, Burton Barr Library, Phoenix