FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile
The ability to portray empathetic characters is one of narrator Hillary Huber’s signature skills. Listeners will be moved by the gritty story of felon Jodi McCarty, who was convicted of murder at age 17, imprisoned for life, and then unexpectedly released 18 years later. In a tone of awe and loss, Huber lets Jodi’s slow movement into her new world of freedom gradually unwind. So much has changed, but Jodi is focused on one mission: to make amends, Huber allows more confidence and joy into her voice as Jodi reclaims her lost life. Together, she and her new girlfriend, Miranda, search for a way to find peace to go along with Jodi’s new freedom. R.O. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
10/22/2018
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. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
One of Real Simple's Best Books of 2019 One of Southern Living's Best New Books of Winter 2019 “The literary lineages here are hard-boiled fiction and film noir, but on every page of her debut novel, Mesha Maren creates bold new takes on those venerable genres, a much needed refresh of worn tropes and clichés. Maren is masterly at describing America’s modern wastelands, the blasted towns not yet and maybe never-to-be the beneficiaries of rehabilitation and reoccupation. You can almost see Maren—like Raymond Chandler—cutting each typed page into three strips and requiring each strip to contain something delightful (startling simile, clever dialogue, brilliant description) offered to the reader as a recompense for a world that presses up against you all raw and aggressive and dangerous. A language that fully owns its power to capture just that 'heart-wild magic.' ”—Charles Frazier, The New York Times Book Review “A darkly steamy first novel . . . ravishingly rugged . . . a literary page-turner, hair-raising in both plot and prose. Maren writes with windswept grace and stark sensuality."—O, The Oprah Magazine “Sugar Run is a shining debut, with a heady admixture of explosive plot and taut, burnished prose. This is a book that loves its wounded characters and troubled places, and in so deeply loving, it finds a terrible truth and beauty where other writers wouldn't have found the courage to look. I'm glad to be among the first to sing the praise of this young writer when I say that Mesha Maren writes like a force of nature.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies “Crisp as mountain air and full of grit and heart, Maren’s writing announces a new voice in the Appalachian noir genre.” —Garden Gun “We love Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run, a gritty noir novel like you’ve never read before.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tense, atmospheric Southern noir spiked with queer themes, Sugar Run weaves between two timelines in its depiction of Jodi, a woman just finishing an 18-year prison sentence.”—Entertainment Weekly (The 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2019) “Sugar Run throttles . . . The clip is fast and exciting.”—Wall Street Journal “Through exquisite prose and beautifully nuanced storytelling, Maren offers a complicated examination of love, identity, the passage of time, and the way small decisions can propel a life forward. . . . undeniably tender.”—Bustle “In her darkly crackling debut novel, Mesha Maren takes readers for a wild ride, the kind that feels like you’re hurtling down a backwoods road at night, not quite sure if you’re ever going to be able to stop, wondering if you might even suddenly take flight. Maren’s story jumps back-and-forth in time, following the lives of two women, both aching with their need for love and freedom. Maren details the struggles and triumphs of these women with unflinching precision and language as beautiful and ferocious as a summer storm.”—Nylon.com (50 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2019) “In Masha Maren's impressive debut, Jodi McCarty is released from prison after an 18-year sentence and is determined not to repeat past mistakes. While wandering around the South, she meets a young woman named Miranda, who has just left an abusive relationship. Together, they go looking for someone from Jodi's past and head to West Virginia—followe
FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile
The ability to portray empathetic characters is one of narrator Hillary Huber’s signature skills. Listeners will be moved by the gritty story of felon Jodi McCarty, who was convicted of murder at age 17, imprisoned for life, and then unexpectedly released 18 years later. In a tone of awe and loss, Huber lets Jodi’s slow movement into her new world of freedom gradually unwind. So much has changed, but Jodi is focused on one mission: to make amends, Huber allows more confidence and joy into her voice as Jodi reclaims her lost life. Together, she and her new girlfriend, Miranda, search for a way to find peace to go along with Jodi’s new freedom. R.O. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-10-02
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.
