Stony Lonesome Road: a YA novel

Jenny Barker, a street-smart thirteen-year-old, lives in Buffalo with her mother, Rudy, and “stepfather,” Daddy Jake—both meth heads. One morning, Rudy kills Daddy Jake with his own rifle and is sentenced to life in prison. Jenny is shipped off to Paris, New York, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, to live on a farm with an old woman, her granddaughter, and the hired man—a shopworn backup-guitar-player from the Janis Joplin era. Although Jenny vows to get out of Paris as fast as she can, things don’t unfold the way she thought they would and gradually she finds hope: an amazing musical talent she didn’t know she had, Gracie Disher, a kindred spirit who lives right down the road, and Bo, the hired man who shows Jenny what a loving parent is like. Jenny Barker is not a regular girl. She’s “a kid who has seen and heard every hateful, gross thing a human being is capable of doing or saying.” How Jenny deals with the secrets and mysteries of her train-wreck family makes for captivating reading. "The characters just about dance off the pages in this graceful and touching story about a young girl's search for love.” ---Lesley Kagen, New York Times bestselling author of The Undertaking of Tess and The Resurrection of Tess Blessing.