by Beth Macy
First sentence: “It was June 2023, and Silas James had just graduated from Urbana High School, forty-one years after I wore that same insignia.”
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Release date: October 7, 2025
Review copy pilfered from the ARC shelves at the bookstore.
Content: There is swearing, including multiple f-bombs, and mention of sexual abuse. It will be in the Biography section of the bookstore.

When Beth Macy graduated from Urbana High School in 1982, she was able to go to a four-year college on a Pell Grant, since she came from a poor household. She used it as her ticket out, moving first to Georgia and then to Virginia. But, 40 years later, as divisions in her family and between her high school friends grew, she returned to find out why the graduation rate dropped, the addiction rate soared, and it’s harder than ever to get out of the poverty people find themselves in.

It’s a good story, as Macy recounts her troubled childhood with an alcoholic father, interspersing that with the stories of some of the students and people she met over the course of the year and a half she researched this book. She talked to many of the kids she went to school with, trying to understand where they were coming from politically, even as she found them on ever-widening divides. She explores the ways in which poverty makes life challenging and the ways that trauma continues to affect people. She is staunchly anti-Republican, detailing all the ways the Republican party hurts the people it claims to help, but she is not pro-Democrat, faulting them for not reaching out to the poor working class in order to help. It’s a challenging read at times, but it’s a good one: Macy is a good writer, and she has empathy for the people she’s writing about.

It’s an excellent, and important, book.