I would like to see this book made into a movie. The characters and the writing drew you in. I could not get enough of this book. First time reading this author, but not my last. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the arc of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving this book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

This book amplifies the voices and experiences of working class poor people in a small rust belt town. As someone who enjoys the privileges of being middle class, well educated, white collar, and urban, I appreciated learning about people whom I would likely never meet on my own. The best part about this book is how these characters, even the local slumlords who are just trying to hold their heads above water too, feel authentic and well rounded.

The weakest issue is that the story sometimes veers into sentimentality, and convenient plot twists force the narrative into a "poor but real" versus "fake rich folks" dichotomy. The book ends without resolving some key plot points, almost as if the author ran out of steam (or perhaps she wanted the readers to continue the story within their own imaginations?). Recommended for all libraries.

[book:Each Vagabond by Name|29064766], a debut novel by Margo Orlando Littell is a novel that spoke to me about coping with loss, about belonging and how to find a way forward from adverse circumstances. It had me looking forward to her next one and I wasn’t disappointed with this, her latest book, which spoke to me in many of the same ways.

Robin Besher, down and out as a desperate teen age girl leaves an abusive alcoholic mother resorting to the worst to survive. At 43 and what feels like light years away from the town of Four Points, Robin has escaped the town, leaving her secretive past, but still taking her sadness with her. Robin lives in an affluent community with the her husband Ray and teen age daughter Haley. Tragedy strikes and Robin has to return to her roots to tend to the dilapidated rental properties her husband spent all their money on, before he dies. She’s feeling down and out once again, having to move with Haley from their comfortable home and existence and try to survive on the meager rents these places bring in.

It’s never easy to escape one’s past and sometimes just impossible, but in spite of everything, Robin has the capacity to be empathetic and kind to her tenants and then to a teenage girl and her infant who she meets on the street . Having lost everything, except her daughter, she musters up the wherewithal to do what she needs to do to make a good life for Haley. This strong and caring woman hasn’t lost her empathy or her ability to care about people. I admired her as well as an old friend Cindy, just one of the people from Robin’s past that become a part of this story. A laudable second novel.

I received a copy of this book from University of New Orleans Press through NetGalley.

After the death of our main character Robin’s husband, she is left in some financial trouble. He leaves her some investment property that takes investing her time and she becomes a reluctant landowner to some rundown rentals. She is forced to return to her home town with her daughter

The story is slow at times and seems like a simple story here, however, there are some darker themes to the story that Margo Orlando Littell handles with a lighter hand while provoking an emotional response from me for the characters. The strength is in the depth to the characters, their growth and the relationship between Robin and her friend from her past Cindy. I enjoyed seeing how they both developed through the story and learned something about themselves from each other. Both characters are convincing with their strength and courage but Cindy stood out for me. She is honest and tough with the way she lays it all out there for Robin showing her that it’s not about a better life but coming to terms with your past.

Now I did question one character and how convenient everything came together but sometimes this reader just needs to lighten up and enjoy a good ending.

Publishers Synopsis: Soon after her husband’s tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible―before anyone exposes Robin’s secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she’d worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes. Margo Orlando Littell, author of Each Vagabond by Name, tells an enthralling and nuanced story about family, womanhood, and coming to terms with a left-behind past.

Review:

**Trigger Warning: This book and review discusses, sometimes in graphic detail, the subjects of rape, sexual assault, prostitution, infant death, physical abuse and domestic abuse**

Despite the confronting trigger warning I didn’t find this book to be overly *heavy* with the topics previously mentioned. There was enough detail to outline the scene, but not enough to have me triggered or avoiding the book temporarily (Hello “A Little Life). The main character, Robin, sure has lived a crazy life and when circumstances have her, without any other choice, returning to her childhood town that she has tried to escape from her entire life she finally has to face the demons that she has been running from.

The thing I loved most about this book was the character development. It’s not often that you see a pretentious, materialistic middle aged woman changing her ways (Trust me- I know plenty of them *eyeroll*). But I loved reading about Robins journey happening incredibly fast over a very short amount of time.

Unlike some other books I’ve read previously (The Silent Treatment) this story does not leave you in the dark about character secrets and stories. You learn very early on about Robins dark past, and throughout the book you can experience genuine anxiety along with her as she encounters people from her past, or present and must disclose her dark past. I love it when an author does this because it helps you feel what the character is feeling and empathise with them along the way.

I found it hard, however, to feel like I could trust Vincent in the end. Yes he seems nice and all and never asked for anything in return, but it seems he’s incredibly selfish (whilst being selfless) and might just be doing good deeds to satisfy his own conscience and moral guilt for having assualted/raped Robyn in the past. I dunno, it just seems a bit manipulative to me, and his ways clearly havent changed. I that people who do bad things aren’t always bad people, but when it’s about topics like these I do find it hard to differentiate and ultimately nod along and go “Oh yes he’s clearly changed his ways, he’s not a bad person anymore even though he raped somebody in the past”. I think that people who have experienced this kind of abuse, whether psychological or sexual may have some trouble with this book and Vincents character in particular. Coming from a victim herself. But in saying that I still give this book five stars. I couldn’t put it down at all and read it in about 7 hours total. Books that have me doing that always get the five stars.

My sincerest thanks to Netgalley and University of New Orleans Press for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

5/5 Stars.

If you're looking for light easy reading this is not the book for you. Who says you can't go home again? You can, and it's just as bad as it was the first time. Robin was born in Four Points, a dead-end former mining town where she spent her first nineteen years. Her mother was a junkie who left her on her own and Robin survived with help from her friend Cindy and Cindy's mother. ( If you could call becoming a teen-age prostitute in order to survive ""help"). Both Cindy and Robin sold sex in the basement of Cindy's house.

Robin becomes pregnant by an older businessman who visits Four Points. She bears a son who dies of SIDS , breaking her heart. Working later as a waitress, Robin meets Roy, a contractor, who marries her and takes her to live in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. They have a daughter named Haley. Robin discovers how easy it is to adjust to luxury. Then Roy dies in an accident and she finds herself broke because he has invested everything in a number of houses and apartments in Four Corners.

This book is heartbreaking in its description of poverty and hand'-to-mouth existence. The food, the dirt, the odors, the roaches, the rodents are real enough to make you see and smell them. Robin's efforts to clean up these properties and rent them out is backbreaking and expensive. She want to to make enough being a slumlord to buy her way back to her suburb and bring her daughter back to a safe place, but this proves impossible.

Seeing how Robin survives and changes and ultimately appreciates her own strengths is the strength of this novel. Littell, having grown up in Appalachia, brings a realistic view into how many people in poverty fight to survive.. You will never look at a Walmart the same way again. This is a fine book and worth your time.

I really enjoyed this book. I got sucked in by the storytelling and found it easy to visualize the places and characters. I also appreciated the ending, I thought it was appropriate without tying things up in an artificially neat bow.

Four Points was the small town in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania where Robin Besher grew up, a place which she never wanted to return. Her memories of living there are the kind anyone would want to forget, but when her husband Ray dies unexpectedly, and she then learns the truth of their financial situation. Ray had invested all of the money into a few small run-down rental units in the place she never wanted to see again, let alone move back to. Made even harder to bear is the thought of taking her teenage daughter Haley with her, to move into one of these small ranch home ’wearing its careless vacancy like a gruesomely scarred, unpatched eye.’

Haley, at the age of thirteen, has never known such poverty, having lived her whole life in an exclusive community where places like this were completely foreign to her, so her reaction to their new housing situation leaves Robin feeling like a failure as a mother, feeling she should have known, and prevented this turn of events, somehow.

Determined to get them out of this situation, and especially this town, she promises over and over, to herself and to Haley that they will return to Mount Rynda, if not the beautiful four-bedroom home they no longer own, by spring. In the meantime, she hopes her past won’t come back to haunt her. More importantly, she hopes it won’t be revealed to Haley, a past not even her husband knew about.

’Twenty years later, the weight was still there. Hidden, buried, but just as heavy. Compressed like coal into a diamond, or like an ugly, invasive irritant layered and wrapped and worried into a pearl.’

But, as we all know, wishing, hoping rarely change the course of events, and it’s only a matter of time before she begins to see familiar faces, and they see her. And as she struggles to prevent the inevitable, she finds that one of Haley’s classmates is the daughter of the one woman she’d hoped to avoid, the one who knew all of her secrets.

Around four years ago I read, and really enjoyed, Margo Orlando Littell’s debut novel Each Vagabond by Name, so I was happy when I saw that she had written a new book, and happier still when I received a copy. And once I began reading this, I didn’t want to put it down, finding myself pulled into these lives, sharing their hopes for resolution, and a better life ahead.


Pub Date: 28 May 2020

Many thanks for the ARC provided by University of New Orleans Press

'She owned a piece of that place, a burden she had to carry again, twenty years after her escape.'

The past can’t be slipped out of that easily, Robin Besher learns this immediately after her husband Ray’s death. Having spent all their money on run down ‘slum’ rentals in the Appalachian town of Four Points, Robin has no choice but to return to the hometown she escaped and all the horrible memories of her seedy past. Worse, her thirteen year old daughter Haley will be ‘dragged away from everything she has ever known’ and Robin is helpless in doing anything to change that. Leaving behind a four-bedroom red brick Georgian colonial in the beautiful affluent Mount Rynda for the shock of what awaits them in their new home “a disgusting place” on Dandelion Drive, Robin is desperate to earn enough to breeze out of town… but how? She hadn’t realized just what Ray got them into.

Robin’s husband Ray never knew about the life she lived before him and that was just how she wanted it. No one shucks off the grime of their past by clinging to it, stewing in memories. Robin knew all to well how to be the kind of woman a man wanted; learned at the hungry hands of boys lined up waiting to be ‘serviced’. Her mentor, a tough girl named Cindy, who always smelled of cigarettes and hairspray, who wasn’t as pretty as her but induced fear in the boys who sought her out taught her well. With Cindy’s lead, she learned to hustle, the only choice she had in keeping herself from drowning, her only means of survival was giving boys and men what they came for. But there was more horror than prostitution, there was fooling herself into believing a certain man cared, and nothing is more dangerous than hope. Hope can be like an infection and lead a foolish girl into tragedy.

Everything she abandoned is waiting for her back at Four Points, there is no way she can make enough money to save the sinking ship she and her daughter Haley are trapped on. The rentals are falling apart, it shocks her that anyone would willingly live in such broken down, rock bottom places. Her tenants can’t afford their rent, their isn’t enough money to stretch on repairs, and squatters are a destructive force only adding to her woes. Then there is Tom, who advises her, helps with repairs here and there, and tells her things she doesn’t want to hear. She doesn’t want to be the type of person that blindly ignores living conditions, making money on the downtrodden but reality is grim. Things just keep getting worse.

Then there is Cindy, the past didn’t vanish when Robin was ‘plucked out of Four Points’ by Ray for a better, richer life. While she became a classier woman, one who knows how to move in social circles, how to treat herself with finer things and present herself with grace, Cindy was stuck in their hometown with only herself to create a life worth living. Cindy won’t let her forget who she was anymore than the locals, the men, one in particular who can make her blood freeze with the horrible tragedy she buried. Cindy doesn’t believe glossing up the truth changes it.

Robin’s daughter gets caught up in the life of a teenage mother whose own situation is too close to her own past. Good intentions sometimes bring more trouble than we bargain for, and she may no longer be able to protect her daughter’s delicate sensibilities. Cindy is as strong as ever, knows herself, and Robin may learn she isn’t as different as she thinks she is. The more you try to set yourself apart from others, the more life will remind you who you are. Did she ever truly escape Four Points?

This novel is full of characters who have no choice but to fight. Poverty begets poverty, and while someone may not be so lucky as to be ‘plucked out’ of their rotten circumstances, sometimes they can chose to stop being a victim of them. If you ever wondered how there can be such a disparity between the haves and the have nots, this novel is a window into the obstacles those without opportunity face. What makes you a good person? Is there ever a chance for redemption? Can someone decide to consciously forget those who used them, particularly branded as a certain type of girl, and go on making a life for themselves in the same small town? I think it was brilliant the author kept Cindy in the story-line. She is an example that the past doesn’t stand still nor does it vanish entirely. Shame, redemption, none of it is clean. The years can do a number even on those who don’t seem to deserve forgiveness. The cruelest judge is often ourselves.

Publication Date: May 28, 2020

University of New Orleans Press

In The Distance from Four Points, we meet Robin who is miserable because she has recently lost her husband who had invested their life's savings into slum properties in Four Points, the town where Robin grew up. Robin has a shameful past and a wounded heart from that town. As she is forced to move to Four Points with her teenaged daughter and take up the duties of a slum landlord, she slams up against her past from which she had tried to run away.
What I enjoyed about the book was the tenacious way Robin’s friends helped to bring her to a point of facing her pain and grief and take a step toward healing. Robin was not the only one with a wounded past and when she faced her own pain which had also touched others, their own grief came to light. The book contains adult language and themes and gives an interesting peek in the world of slum landlords and the realities of being poor. It explores the complicated human condition of loss and shame and finding one's true home. I wanted to keep reading to see how Robin coped with being a landlord and bit by bit I learned more of why she had wanted to put Four Point behind her. I would rate this book 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it to readers who enjoy modern day fiction.

This book was so good! The characters were so well rounded, you felt like you actually knew them! The plot was so good you didn't want the book to end!