Stay and Fight

Madeline Ffitch

Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriend’s ideas for living off the land. With winter coming, he calls it quits. Her neighbors help her make it to spring. Soon, these neighbors — Karen, Lily, and newborn Perley — are forced out of their home, so Helen invites them to throw in with her. They split the work and the food, build a house, and make a life that sustains them, if barely, for years. Then young Perley decides he wants to go to school. And unread letters pile up from the gas company that owns the pipeline edging their land. The outside world is brought clamoring into their makeshift family.
Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature, and to make deals with the system. It is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. It is full of flawed, flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn’t the end of love, but the real beginning. And it forces us to reimagine an America we think we know, even as it takes us, laughing and fighting, into a new understanding of what it means to be free.

status	Copy #1 (3189): in
genre	Literature and Fiction » General Literature
publisher	Picador
publish date	2019
popularity	checked out 0 time(s)