Bicentennial Baby

She was born on the Fourth of July, 1976. The nurse tied a scrap of red-white-and-blue ribbon to her hospital bracelet and called her a firecracker. Her mother took her home to the holler 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, an almost-marriage that never quite became one, and a career in music she's all but abandoned. When her mother collapses three days before Christmas, Lacey drives home to Pound, Virginia — to a hospital room, a childhood house, and a drawer full of songs nobody knew her mother had written.

What she finds there makes her question every story she's been telling herself: about the father she lost, the mother who stayed, the man she's been waiting on, and the music she left behind. Across three generations of women — Bea, Gina, and Lacey — runs the same inheritance: survival handed down in place of tenderness, armor handed down in place of warmth.

Bicentennial Baby is a literary Appalachian novel about inherited patterns, the cost of hope, and what a woman has to lay down at a grave before she can finally carry anything else. For readers of Olive Kitteridge, Demon Copperhead, and Our Souls at Night.