Syd Murphy takes a librarian job in Jericho, Virginia. Eighteen months in the mountains—a deliberate distance from a marriage that collapsed, a way to let time work on the damage without anyone watching. The plan is simple: stay quiet, let the assignment run, leave when it’s finished.
Small towns don’t cooperate with plans like that.
Jericho pulls her in. The residents aren’t the type to let a newcomer exist in isolation. There are dinners, conversations, the casual gravity of a place where everyone eventually knows everyone. Syd finds herself embedded in community life before she’s decided whether she wants to be.
Maddie Stevenson is at the center of it. A physician who came back to run her father’s practice after he died—her own reasons for returning to the backcountry are as complicated and guarded as Syd’s reasons for arriving. They meet in the way small towns arrange these things: inevitably, repeatedly, until the meetings become something else.
McMan writes this landscape without the pity that usually comes with Appalachian fiction. There’s no condescension, no poverty porn. The mountains are just where these people live, with all the fullness and complexity that entails. The friendship between Syd and Maddie develops with actual patience—not rushed, not forced, but allowed to unfold at the pace the setting naturally imposes. The mountains don’t hurry anything. Neither do the characters.
What starts as two women finding refuge in a small town becomes two women discovering what refuge actually looks like when it has a face and a name.
Details
| ISBN: 9781939562210 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Romance |
| Subject(s): Fiction |
| Publication Date: 2013-10-02 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company |
| Language: English |
| Format: Hardcover |
| Pages: 416 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Ann McMan is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author with a substantial catalog of lesbian fiction. Jericho was her debut novel and introduced the characters that continue through her Jericho series. |
| Book_ID: 106126 |