Stay and Fight: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of July 2019: Winter is coming! And if you’re on your own in Appalachian Ohio, you’d better come up with a good game plan. For Helen, this means enlisting recently displaced neighbors Karen and Lily, along with the couple’s precocious son, Perley, to create a homestead with her on 20 acres of land. Perley is an intrepid soul, and by the time he expresses interest in leaving their isolated existence to go to school, you’re almost used to his normal: living (and sometimes sleeping with) black rat snakes, minding the “humanure” pile, and foraging for dinner when the daily game of “survival dice” doesn’t win a trip to the grocery store. Social services, however, is decidedly more fazed, so when an innocent accident attracts their attention, the family’s imperfect, but preferred, utopia is upended. First-time novelist Madeline ffitch’s background as an environmental activist is evident in Stay and Fight, which deftly pivots from family drama to an encroaching political one that poses even more of a threat to their way of life. If that sounds stress-inducing, it is, but it’s tempered by the characterizations of this unconventional family, particularly the exquisitely endearing Perley, who is uniquely bonded to each member of this motley crew and provides the motivation behind the book’s title. Stay and Fight is an earnest and heart-wrenching celebration of family, and what it means to be free. --Erin Kodicek, Amazon Book Review