#sugar run
Rating: Great Read
Genre: Realism, Literary
Representation:
-Lesbian main character
-Bisexual supporting character
Trigger warnings: Murder; Cheating; Drug abuse; Addiction; Guns; Human trafficking; Homophobic violence (extreme, not in scene); Threat of homophobic violence; CSA (in character backstory, not in scene); child abuse and neglect; infant death (in character backstory, not in scene)
Note: Not YA; sexually explicit
Jodi McCarty was sentenced to life in prison in 1989, when she was only seventeen. She suddenly finds herself free eighteen years later, and all she wants is to finish what she started eighteen years ago. Back then, she and her girlfriend Paula had dreams to rescue Paula’s little brother from her abusive family. Now that Jodi is out of prison, she picks up where she left off. Only, Ricky is an adult, now. And he isn’t the only person Jodi ends up rescuing.
Miranda Matheson Golden is a foil to Jodi, and Jodi’s lover. Miranda’s childhood was also abruptly severed at seventeen when the much older rock star Lee Golden, hired by her father to be her music teacher, got her pregnant. Her subsequent marriage to Lee was as much a prison sentence as Jodi’s. Years later, separated from Golden, Miranda lives out of a motel, her life split between providing for her sons, working at a bar, and vanishing into drugs and sex.
Jodi’s dream for eighteen years has been to return to her Grandma Effie’s land in the Appalachians - land that was willed to Jodi - and make something of it. But she finds, with Ricky, Miranda, and Miranda’s sons in tow, that it won’t be that easy. There is no such thing as picking up where you left off.
Sugar Run has a lot of moving parts, split across eighteen years. It is a novel that offers stories piecemeal in service of creating a final patchwork, the pattern only clear after the pieces have been sewn in place. The pieces that take place in 1989 slowly tell the story of how Jodi ended up going to prison. Though we know her crime more or less from the beginning of the story, the reader doesn’t learn why she did it until the end. This approach, as we learn more about Jodi and her then-girlfriend Paula’s relationship, keeps the reader turning pages. The present day portions of the novel are equally tense. Rather than building up to an inevitable crime, however, the present day shows the juggling act of trying to survive while life throws one curveball after another.
Sugar Run is a poignant portrayal of how poverty, drug abuse, and petty crime are inevitably linked in Appalachia - and without the condemning (nor clinical) gaze of an outsider writing a “study.” Above all, Sugar Run is a journey of self-discovery - a delayed bildungsroman for a woman whose coming of age was cut short. And in that self-discovery, Jodi discovers just what kind of net she finds herself trapped in on probation in Appalachia.
As Jodi is increasingly boxed in by compounding limitations of poverty, homophobia, misogyny, and the fact that she’s marked as an ex-con, the novel shows the lengths she must go to just to live. While much of the novel is about Jodi’s internal world, external factors are the lion’s share of Jodi’s problems. She doesn’t have the luxury of dwelling on guilt, for example, when she has to worry about the safety of her chosen family first. And that danger escalates in extreme measure before the novel ends. In Jodi’s world, violence isn’t something a person can say “no” to just because one is on probation. Looking the other way rather than fighting back means allowing that violence to happen to someone else - either way, while you may not be culpable with the law, you’re culpable to yourself.
I have been chewing over the ending of the novel for several weeks in preparation for this review. Sugar Run doesn’t have a traditional plot, being a character-driven novel, and so doesn’t fulfill a traditional resolution. Yet for a character-driven novel, escalating external factors give Jodi’s arc the ending one would expect from a Western. Sugar Run holds itself up as realism, but there is something cowboy-ish about this novel. Murder, shoot-outs, rescue missions, armed robbery, and extortion are all presented as if they are as inevitable to Appalachian life as going out for a beer. Perhaps this is part of the point of the novel - Jodi’s Romantic vision of herself as one of the old guard, her dream of living off her grandmother’s land in the traditional way, is, like the ending of the novel, more genre fiction than reality. Or, interpretted another way, Jodi cannot have one without the other. Living off the land, being a cowboy, comes hand in hand with the brutal, larger than life consequences of living outside of the bounds of the modern world.
I recommend Sugar Run. It has the lilting, introspective tone of a literary novel, but unpretentiously in service of a character and story which have earned the elevated treatment - especially considering there is no lack of external conflict to move the story along. It’s a rough read, about characters who lead tangled, painful lives, and who struggle to see themselves as more than victims, as bad circumstances compound into worse ones. The list of trigger warnings may be lengthy, but never give a sour, hopeless taste to the book. For lovers of deep character study and richly realized settings, you couldn’t do better than Sugar Run.
For more from Mesha Maren, visit her website here.
