Someplace Like Home - by Bobi Conn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A mother and daughter in Appalachia unpack the traumas of the past in a powerful and reflective novel about family, healing, and moving on by the author of A Woman in Time.

Jenny Caudill grows up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a home that feels more like a trap. Shy, ignored by boys, and wearing her sisters' hand-me-downs, Jenny spends her time lost in the promises of romantic pop songs and daydreaming in the back seat of her daddy's junked Bel Air. There's got to be more to life.

When she catches the eye of the older Rob Lewis, a dangerous relationship begins. Her mother's warnings go ignored. After a brush with death and an impulsive marriage in Tennessee, Jenny becomes a mother herself. But her love story is far from the one she envisioned. Trading one trap for another darker one, she is stuck between trying to avoid her husband's violent moods and taking an unknown risk by grabbing her children, running, and trying to find a way forward.

As Jenny's daughter, Charlie, comes of age, she strives to understand the choices her mother made, to confront the traumas that shaped both their lives, and to overcome any limits the forces of the past have imposed.

Review Quotes

"Sometimes true stories can be the hardest to believe, which makes them that much harder to tell. In this fictionalized account of her family, Bobi Conn immerses us in the lives of three generations of Appalachian women, weaving their trials, tragedies, and personal triumphs through a gritty and all-too-real world. At times heartbreaking, at others heartwarming, this story is an ode to the women not of a particular time but of a particular place, and Bobi Conn shares it all with style and care." --R. Dean Johnson, author of Californium

"In this companion work to her much-lauded memoir, In the Shadow of the Valley, author Bobi Conn relates in her beautiful, clean voice the backstory of her family's history in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Someplace Like Home is a fictionalized account of the lives of her grandmother and mother, detailing the remarkable circumstances they endured in a fierce, isolated, often traumatic environment that was, at the same time, possessed of a wild and staggering beauty. Conn is among the most moving and talented of our Appalachian authors. It was an honor to read this book." --Kimmery Martin, author of The Queen of Hearts and Doctors and Friends