Bug - by Amy Conner (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Some people are born into privilege. Others are born into survival. Sweetpea Bird was born to outrun both. The Mississippi Delta, Summer, 1983. Thirteen-year-old Sweetpea Bird is a landless, bi-racial orphan with an extraordinary gift: an almost supernatural connection with horses. In the racing world, a rider small enough to exercise thoroughbreds is known as a "bug," and Sweetpea is one of the most fearless young riders anyone has ever seen. Taken from their mother's arms during the Fall of Saigon and raised by their American grandparents, Sweetpea has spent a lifetime searching for a place to belong. Refusing to be confined by expectations of race, class, or gender, Sweetpea defines themselves with quiet certainty: "I'm just me, my ownself, Sweetpea Bird." That search leads to Good Shepherd Plantation, an elite thoroughbred breeding farm owned by the mysterious and fabulously wealthy Eden Palliser. Brilliant, volatile, and haunted by a devastating past, Eden is a woman whose immense fortune has done nothing to quiet her loneliness or her unraveling mind.When Sweetpea enters her world, an unexpected bond forms between them one that is as life-changing as it is dangerous.As the rhythms of horse racing, plantation life, and the fading traditions of the Delta unfold, Sweetpea discovers that the greatest risks are not found on the backstretch but within the fragile terrain of the human heart. Told through the alternating voices of Sweetpea and Eden, BUG is a haunting Southern Gothic novel about identity, family, obsession, survival, and the profound need to be seen and loved. Rich with unforgettable characters, breathtaking landscapes, and the timeless relationship between humans and animals, Amy Conner's debut explores the complicated ways damaged people search for redemption in one another. Atmospheric, emotionally fearless, and impossible to forget, BUG is a novel about those who exist outside society's expectations and the extraordinary courage it takes to become exactly who you are. Amy Conner's BUG introduces Sweetpea Bird, an unforgettable thirteen-year-old biracial orphan whose extraordinary gift for riding thoroughbred racehorses offers her a chance to transcend the limitations of race, class, and circumstance. Fiercely independent, intelligent, and determined to forge her own destiny, Sweetpea anchors a compelling Southern coming-of-age novel that explores identity, family, gender, and belonging. Blending emotional depth with the excitement of horse racing, BUG is a powerful, ultimately uplifting story of resilience, courage, and the universal search for a place to call home an appealing choice for readers of literary fiction, Southern fiction, and character driven historical novels.

Review Quotes

Rich with characters you won't soon forget (especially the horses), BUG speaks with heartfelt and sometimes heartbreaking eloquence about our most human needs to be seen, to belong, to be loved, to become our own true selves. Author Bill Loehfelm Winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for his novel Fresh Kills, his work has appeared in the anthologies Year Zero and Life in the Wake

Amy Conner is one of our best writers of character. In BUG, Conner has given us Eden and Sweatpea, an older woman and a girl, who refuse to bow to society's idea of womanhood. BUG is charming, thrilling, and enlightening. Readers will rush to finish the book so that they can restart it. Maurice Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow and The American Daughters There are novels that wound and novels that seem, impossibly, to press on the wound.

Amy Conner's BUG belongs to that second, rarer category: a book of startling beauty and controlled brutality, attuned to the ways tenderness can become perilous and survival, from the outside, can resemble surrender. Sabrina Canfield for Artvoices

About the Author

Amy Conner is the author of several books, two of which--The Right Thing and Million Dollar Road--have been published. As an autistic child growing up in Jackson, Mississippi and the Delta, she spent far more time than grownups realized, eavesdropping on them when they talked about other people. Bug is a careful retelling of one truly memorable story overheard when she was five. After a lifetime of writing, drinking and arguing with the Sewage and Water Board in New Orleans, she now lives in Jackson again, in the same neighborhood where she grew up, with Slightly, the neurotic lurcher, and a glaring of feral cats who have illegally annexed her backyard.