Sugar Run

October 22, 2018
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.

October 15, 2018
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 her--and 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.

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November 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from November 15, 2018

DEBUT When Jodi McCarty leaves prison at 35 after serving 18 years of a life sentence for manslaughter, she doesn't head immediately to the worn-out Appalachian town that no longer feels like home. She heads to Chaunceloraine, GA, to keep a longtime promise. Along the way, she meets pill-popping, alcohol-swilling Miranda, wife of has-been musician Lee Golden, who's keeping wild-girl Miranda from their three sons. Miranda and Jodi get involved immediately and passionately, but before Miranda there was sharp-edged Paula, for whom Jodi is keeping that promise, a tough woman haunting this story like a dark ghost. The interlocked and heartbreaking stories of Jodi and Miranda and Lee and Paula and Paula's simple, badly used brother unfold in language that is just plain grittily gorgeous. These are stories of violence and passion and squashed hope--at one point, Jodi says, "she'd laid the old pattern over her new life like the fragile tissue-paper outlines Effie had used to cut dresses"--and you will feel every word. VERDICT A highly recommended debut.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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