Review: "Someplace Like Home" by Bobi Conn

Someplace Like Home by Bobi Conn
Published May 2024 via Little A
★★★★

Three generations of women in rural Appalachia: Helen raises her children strictly and with little room for “extras”, but her home is more or less a happy one, a safe one. Her youngest daughter, Jenny, is a Kentucky girl through and through, and she imagines that her adult life will mirror the small-town stability she grew up with—but as she gets older, she’s also swayed by the thrill of being courted by someone she views as out of her league. And the choices she makes based on that thrill—choices very in line with time and place and a limited range of ambitions for her future—will come to define, if not haunt, her life. And then there’s Jenny’s daughter, also a Kentucky girl through and through but, eventually, with a more reflective view on her family’s history than either Jenny or Helen has ever really been able to apply.

The story moves chronologically (with some slight deviation at the end; more on that in a moment), starting with a relatively broad look at Helen’s young-married life but spending most time on Jenny’s story. You can see the spiral before it even begins: her paramour Rob is, to an outside eye (or, for that matter, to anyone in Jenny’s life), Bad News from the very beginning…but all Jenny can see is that she is young and unsophisticated, and someone older and ‘cooler’ has taken an interest in her. You can guess, maybe, the general direction in which her story goes.

Jenny's story is, Conn says in the introduction, a fictionalized version of her mother's life. Fictionalizing real life can be risky, but here I think it pays off—I don't know how much here has been changed from Conn's mother's life, but I suspect that a basis in reality is giving us a story with fewer easy answers and happy endings than pure fiction would have. Jenny's perspective is sometimes hard to take—she's Rob's staunchest defender, even (or especially) when he doesn't deserve it. Rob didn't explode every day. He didn't hit me every day or make me have sex with him whether I wanted to or not. Some nights he did, but not every night (loc. 2395). She's always looking for the romance she'd imagined she'd have, even when all the evidence says that she's looking in the wrong place, looking for the wrong hero. It's...not a tack I've ever taken, and I hope it's not one that I ever will, but I think we've probably all known someone in some form of Jenny's shoes.

This is a multigenerational saga, and the one thing I'm not much a fan of is the 'looking back' tone of Jenny's daughter's section, which takes me out of the story somewhat. I think I would have preferred a continuation of the more chronological structure, one in which we see more clearly how this third generation has taken shape and has learned from—or sometimes not learned from—those who went before them. I imagine it may be done as it is because Conn has already written a memoir (which I now want to read); perhaps continuing that story felt too much like a retread of the memoir material.

I lived in the South for a while—not in the same state or the same circumstances that Jenny and her mother and daughter do—and I'm always drawn to these stories of various forms of hardscrabble lives. Reminds me of the hot humid air, of crickets singing in the evening.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.