It is difficult, if not impossible, for newly released convicts to get back on their feet after their sentences. The lucky ones find jobs and have support networks. Unlucky ones, like Jodi in Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run, have no guidance after they are set at liberty. All Jodi has is an appointment with a parole officer, a $400 loan from her family, and a self-imposed mission to find a friend from eighteen years prior with whom she has unfinished business. Jodi was a very young girl when she went in, with no advanced education or job skills; she was in prison for longer than she was free. All that said, I think any reader can agree that the choices Jodi makes after she finishes her sentence are definitely not the right choices.
We meet Jodi on the bus from Jaxton Prison, where she has just finished serving eighteen years for manslaughter. She has a vague plan to go back to the town her lover, Paula, was from in Georgia to pick up the lover’s younger brother, to save him from an abusive family. Long flashbacks slowly reveal what happened between Jodi and Paula that landed Jodi in prison for so long. In between the flashbacks, we watch Jodi as she makes one bad decision after another: she picks up a drug addict with three kids who is in the middle of a long, emotional drama with her musician husband; she helps said drug addict kidnap those kids; she squats on family land that was auctioned off for taxes; she lets her brother store drugs and more on the property. There’s a lot of alcohol and a lot of drugs in this novel, which absolutely does not help things.
Sugar Run depicts a train wreck of a life. There are so many points in Jodi’s story where, if she’d had a bit more perspective and a bit more of a vision of what she wanted her life to be, Jodi might have been okay. Jodi might also have been okay if she’d had a functional support system, if she hadn’t returned to the economically depressed mountains of West Virginia, if she hadn’t fallen in lust with a drug addict. But then, Jodi might also have been okay right from the very beginning if it weren’t for her jealously and complete inability to say no to people who want her to do illegal things for them. Which brings me back around to the question about whether or not it’s possible for convicts to have any kind of life after serving time. Is it Jodi’s circumstances or her personality that landed her in trouble? Is it her situation or her inability to learn from her mistakes that keeps her from a legal kind of life? Sugar Run doesn’t give us any answers along with these questions, but it offers plenty of food for thought about readers curious about prison and judicial reform or life in Appalachia. This is an excellent book club read.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 8 January 2019.