Just Jennifer

Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy (Putnam, March 3, 2015)

Jacob McNeely realizes his life in the Appalachian town of Cashiers, North Carolina is harsher than most.  His mother is a crack addict, living away from her son and husband from whom she stole the drugs, angering the man who runs a profitable meth ring, laundering the money through his garage, keeping the necessary people on his payroll to appear legitimate.  Jacob, who has been working for his father since he was a young boy dropped out of school two years ago at the age of sixteen and has cut himself off from his friends and peers.  The only hope he has left is the distant possibility of reuniting with Maggie, his first and only love, the girl whose heart he broke, he thought, so she could save herself and get far away from Jacob and the place Jacob hates even if he can’t.  When a fatal mistake is made by others working for his father, Jacob realizes this is his chance to get out.  But then events take a turn that make Jacob realize he is forever tethered to his family and these mountains unless he can stand up and face his father, a Sisyphean task that few survive to tell about.

David Joy’s prose is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking and gut wrenching as he portrays the mountains of North Carolina as a harsh a brutal place, but then finds one element about which to meditate on for a sentence or two as he juxtaposes hope with despair and the willingness of Jacob to accept his fate even with the distant promise of Maggie.  As Jacob begins to see glimpses of hope and a young woman willing to take a chance on him, he allows himself to believe it might be possible, until, too late, he realizes all hope is lost for him as he sacrifices everything to keep alive the faith he has in the woman he love as this story reaches its inevitable heart wrenching conclusion.  Fans of the Southern fiction of Ron Rash and Wiley Cash will fall in love with this new voice.