COTTONMOUTHS, a GritLit Lesbian take on "Winter's Bone"

COTTONMOUTHS
KELLY J. FORD
Skyhorse Publishing
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: This was Drear’s Bluff. Nothing bad happened here. People didn’t disappear.

College was supposed to be an escape for Emily Skinner. But after failing out of school, she’s left with no choice but to return to her small hometown in the Ozarks, a place run on gossip and good Christian values.

She’s not alone. Emily’s former best friend—and childhood crush—Jody Monroe is back with a baby. Emily can’t resist the opportunity to reconnect, despite the uncomfortable way things ended between them and her mom’s disapproval of their friendship. When Emily stumbles upon a meth lab on Jody’s property, she realizes just how far they’ve both fallen.

Emily intends to keep her distance from Jody, but when she’s kicked out of her house with no money and nowhere to go, a paying job as Jody’s live-in babysitter is hard to pass up. As they grow closer, Emily glimpses a future for the first time since coming home. She dismisses her worries; the meth is a means to an end. And besides, for Emily, Jody is the real drug.

But when Emily’s role in Jody’s business turns dangerous, her choices reveal grave consequences. As the lies pile up, Emily will learn just how far Jody is willing to go to save her own skin—and how much Emily herself has risked for the love of someone who may never truly love her back.

Echoin*g the work of authors like Daniel Woodrell and Sarah Waters, Cottonmouths is an unflinching story about the ways in which the past pulls us back . . . despite our best efforts to leave it behind.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You probably went to Sunday school. Your mama and daddy taught you about Right and Wrong and never the twain shall meet and you either rolled your eyes and agreed to shut them up or absorbed it with every spongy fiber of your kid-soul. Most likely some of both.

But that "moral grounding" does el zippo to prepare you for end-stage capitalism's vampirous demands.

It sure as Hell didn't prepare li'l Emily.

Where she was headed, the cast iron skillet had been seasoned before she was born.
Her mom would cook the beans, potatoes, and cornbread the way her own mother had taught her. Dad would recite the Lord’s Prayer because it required no thought. And Emily would stare at her plate of food and let it go cold while pondering the headset and the cash register and the brown and blue uniform in her back seat, whose fibers still held its last tenant’s stench of fryer grease and body odor—items for a life she had not expected to return to when she left for college, for a job that would not have been offered to her at all had she not removed the name of the state university from her resume—though two years hardly called for its inclusion.

Now you name me a worse feeling than being forced, as an adult, to go to the place you're used to calling Home when it's about as much home as that deep-fat fryer you're smellin' right now.

For a Lesbian sister in a christian-values community, this is WORSE than being in so much debt that you can never dig yourself out, right? Hold my beer, says Author Kelly, I am about to make this fryin' pan seem nuclear powered:

Watching her walk away, Emily felt as dirty as if she’d been watching porn. The craving came on like a fever, as if a coal had been stoked within and blurred the edges of reasonable thought. Rather than push it away, she sat on the floor and let the desire consume her.
–and–
Then an ache no bigger than a marble pulsed inside Emily, an ache born in the woods across the creek. An ache that beat on inside her, steady, steadier, growing until her whole body shook.
–but–
That was the worst of it, to be accused but denied the pleasure of what everyone thought.

That is how Emily responds to the sight of Jody, her long-ago never-was one-that-got-away. Everyone...yeah. Lots of Everyone in Drear's Bluff (isn't that a superb distillation of Home, fellow former Southerners?), and man are they a bunch of self-righteous goobers. Nothing new there...that's how most people are. That's how so many can't help but be, given their lack of moral fiber to resist group-think.

Emily's true self, her inner self, is under siege at home, and she's got to get out...Jody, the woman who revs up her nights this decade-plus, has a solution: Come watch my baby for me! Live here, I'll give you some cash, and you're out of the house. Remember that frying pan?

“This is like the worst stereotype of the South come to life. All you need is a Confederate flag over the fucking door.”
–and–
All those wasted moments of guilt and shame and feeling downright wrong about what she’d done in the bed the night Jody left.
–and–
No matter how tempting the offer, she knew that half a life was no life at all.

It's never, ever the same, not after leaving or coming back; the world's moved on, so have your feelings, so has the person you once had the feelings for. You're in for it, though, while the ride lasts; you're not going to get off until the merry-go-round's slung you onto the bouncy-castle at 55mph and you've gone sailing through the air but there's a landing coming...one you don't have any way to cushion, or even prepare for....

Lovers would come and go. Maybe there’d be one who would be unafraid and teach Emily how to be brave, brave enough to wake up next to her, to walk hand in hand. Someone with whom she’d have a nice life, without trouble and with love. But in the twilight hours of her life, when her body and memory failed, this above all others would be the buoy she would cling to, the memory she would repeat and repeat until the darkness ripped her away. Because this moment, so small, the smallest, had seared her heart.

I wish I'd been able to full-five-star the read; the thing that kept me from doing it was a certain soap-opera quality that, while I didn't hate it (I used to watch All My Children, FFS, I'm not immune to the appeal!), I found...wearing. I wanted something that rose above it more often than something planted squarely in it, and that little niggle took the luster off just enough to be noticeable.