For readers of Lee Smith, Silas House, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ron Rash, Bicentennial Baby is an intimate Appalachian novel about inheritance, independence, and the cost of surviving a life that keeps asking a woman to disappear inside it.

The women who raised Lacey Brummette were tough like the Appalachians that made them. They didn't hand down tenderness. They handed down rules: Have something that's yours. Don't owe anyone. Never depend on anyone.

Lacey spent her life trying to outrun those rules, her mother’s choices, and the coalfield past she thought she had escaped. But by the time she reaches her fiftieth year, she may have run smack dab into the very life she was trying to avoid.

Born on the Fourth of July, 1976, the bicentennial baby, Lacey built a life in music, away from the Virginia coalfields. But when her mother collapses, she goes home. Home to the hills that formed her. Home to the drawer full of secrets. Home to a marriage that looks fine from the outside and is taking more from her than anyone can see. Home to three generations of women who loved hard and survived harder.

Across a single wrenching stretch of her fiftieth year, Lacey begins to see her own life more clearly. Why her mother stayed. What it cost. What gets handed down when women mistake endurance for safety.

Written by singer-songwriter and audiobook narrator Reagan Boggs, Bicentennial Baby is a story about inheritance and independence, about the songs we carry and the ones we finally get to sing. It's a book about coming home, and about the harder homecoming: the one where you finally stop forcing a life that was never going to have room for you.

A character-driven novel for readers who love a strong Appalachian register, slow-burning emotional tension, complicated women, and an ending that trusts them to sit with what’s true rather than what’s tidy.

Bicentennial Baby will likely resonate most with readers who enjoy literary, character-driven fiction centered on family inheritance, complicated women, Appalachian identity, midlife reckoning, and emotionally layered relationships. This is not a romance or a plot-forward domestic drama with a tidy resolution. Its movement is interior and cumulative, following Lacey as illness, marriage, motherhood, music, and family history begin to rearrange what she understands about the women before her and the life she has chosen.

Readers who appreciate regional fiction, mother-daughter stories, emotionally avoidant marriages, divorce after long partnership, blended-family tension, and endings that choose honesty over neat closure are the best fit. The book also includes themes of domestic dysfunction, emotional neglect, parental illness, generational trauma, and the complicated aftermath of loving people who could not fully protect or choose you.

Written by singer-songwriter and audiobook narrator Reagan Boggs, the novel carries music as part of its structure and inheritance: the songs women carry, bury, leave behind, and finally reclaim.