No Deliverance
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         This episode is told in prose that feels like a movie scene filmed with oil on the lens, creating that gauzy, slow-motion sense of dreamlike reality. But then, in a total head-scratching shift of scene and mood, Jodi is boarding a bus headed for Georgia, where she intends to find her dead lover’s brother Ricky. Paula had been Jodi’s lover before Jodi killed her in a fit of rage, and it had always been Paula’s dream to rescue Ricky from his abusive father. Now released, Jodi decides that she should make good on Paula’s intention, though it’s not clear exactly why she feels this. Not knowing where to find him, she lands in a cheap motel, where she meets Miranda.

         Having fled from a husband who’s too absorbed in his waning career and a marriage that’s swallowed her whole, Miranda is staying at the motel, reaching for any lifeline she can find and any stranger who’ll listen. A somewhat sympathetic character who gradually becomes someone you love to hate, Miranda finally admits to herself that she didn’t really want a divorce; she only wanted attention. But her husband took their three young sons and refused any overtures from his estranged, drug-using, alcohol-abusing wife. Bereft, she ends up in Jodi’s bed and talks her into helping get the boys back by taking them from their school without permission. By this time, readers can clearly see that Jodi, who was imprisoned at age seventeen, is inexperienced in the world and ripe for Miranda’s wiles, and that there’s a train wreck coming. That’s especially true when she locates Ricky, who seems to have emotional and mental issues from past (and ongoing) abuse. Ricky agrees to come with Jodi’s makeshift family to West Virginia.

         As we learn the story of Jodi’s past in quick flashbacks that are abrupt and somewhat confusing, we also see the future. In an area that’s obviously poverty-stricken, Jodi plans to raise the boys and love Miranda on Jodi’s grandmother’s farm where she herself had been raised. Alighting in a town that’s distantly familiar and reconnecting with her church-mouse-poor parents, Jodi learns that they allowed her inheritance to be sold for taxes they owed. Worse, the man who owned the property was slowly selling it piecemeal to a fracking sand company. Complications ensue; more characters make the scene—so many, in fact, that the story becomes bogged down by too many people with too many problems, and the novel drifts to a close with a lot of strings left dangling.