Bicentennial Baby: A Literary Appalachian Novel

She was born on the Fourth of July, 1976. The nurse tied a red-white-and-blue ribbon to her hospital bracelet and called her a firecracker. Her mother took her home to a holler in the Virginia coalfields and raised her on two rules: have something that's yours, and don't need anybody. Fifty years later, Lacey Brummett is still trying to figure out how to do both. She has a teenage son she shares with a man she was married to once. An almost-marriage to a second husband who can't quite say the things she needs to hear. A career in music she's all but abandoned. And a quiet, growing suspicion that the life she built to escape her mother's might be the same life in different clothes. Lacey drives back to Pound, Virginia — to a hospital room, a childhood house she hasn't slept in for years, and a drawer full of songs her mother wrote in private and never told anyone about.