Road Tripping Across the USA Mini Reading Challenge: West Virginia

1968 – a year of upheaval for the nation and for the Mitchell family.

For reasons she does not yet understand, Conn is chosen as the one who must unravel the mystery surrounding her ancestor, Caitríona Ní Faolain, who disappeared soon after the Civil War – a mystery that has condemned her family to a curse for over a hundred years.

A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power.

The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them.

So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest—a minor glory that followed her around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her.

Olly Smith-Nakamura had it all until an unexpected financial setback forces her dads to leave their idyllic life in San Francisco behind in search of a fresh start.

Relocating to a small West Virginia town where families like hers are considered an anomaly was not how she planned to spend her senior year of high school. Her grandmother tries to sell her on the merits of her new home, but she just sees more reasons to leave than to stay.

A small county sheriff gets a second chance at love, thirty years in the making.

Sheriff Chance Fitzsimmons’ badge shields her heart as she upholds the law. After an intense rescue, Chance comes face to face with her past love, Jax St. Claire. Can they avoid all the obstacles and see their way into a future together after all these years?

Who will win the war between the inner sinner and saint?

A retired rock star turned pastor is haunted by the demons of her past. What will it take for her to accept the grace she shares with others as she battles her guilt? Can a love from the past lead her down Redemption’s Road?

A picture captures a moment in time, while love captures a lifetime.

Valkyrie (Val) Magnusson travels the country on a motorcycle with a camera as her companion. The former Marine is a nomad with no roots to hold her in place and a nightmare that keeps her moving. At a roadside tourist trap in West Virginia, she may have found a place where she finally fits in and a reason to put down the kickstand.

More than a romance, this is a story of how two women find love in one tiny tourist town in West Virginia during the fight for equality and same-sex marriage.

Good for any time of the year, this heartwarming read is also about family, friends, and forgiveness. But sometimes, forgiving yourself can be the hardest.

Jordan Simón seems to have it all…except a life. On the verge of her fortieth birthday, she doesn’t know which will devour her first—the regret and emptiness of living a lie about her sexuality or a painful secret she has kept for years. As she struggles internally, she meets Emmy Russo, an out and proud lesbian.

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?”

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

Cody Keaton truly believes that money doesn't buy happiness.

She believes this so strongly that when she hits it big in the lottery she considers throwing the ticket away. Once she talks herself off that ledge she vows to use the money only for security, a decision that she honestly believes she can follow. She’s not going to be one of those people who blows it on houses and cars and loses it all.

Her aunts, uncles, cousins and extended family don’t share her view—but most of them itch to share her money.

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is seventeen years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison.

Set within the charged insularity of rural West Virginia, Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run is a searing and gritty debut about making a break for another life, the use and treachery of makeshift families, and how, no matter the distance we think we’ve traveled from the mistakes we’ve made, too often we find ourselves standing in precisely the place we began.

The woods surrounding the insular town of Mill Creek, West Virginia, have a habit of taking people and refusing to give them back.

The National Parks Service Search and Rescue Team knows this, just like they know when you find a door in the woods, you don’t go through it. But park ranger Theo Buchanan has a knack for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Determined to find the truth behind her sister Flora’s strange disappearance, she boldly steps through one such door, catching the attention of the Federal Bureau of Reality. She quickly learns how far they are willing to go to keep their secrets locked tight, even if it means silencing those who stumble upon them permanently.

“A fast-paced, stirring narrative about loss and unrequited love” set amid a destructive cicada swarm in West Virginia (Publishers Weekly).

In a West Virginian town, a brood of Magicicadas emerges for the first time in seventeen years. The cicadas damage crops and trees, and swarm locals. Jessica, a former cop whose entire family was killed in a car crash two years earlier, is deputized during the crisis.

At the same time, she is dealing with her feelings for her sister’s best friend, Natasha, a town council member—and the two-year anniversary of the car crash that killed her family is approaching. As all this descends, a sudden, devastating loss will change everything . . .

SUGAR SUMMER is a lesbian retelling of the '80s classic DIRTY DANCING, like you've never seen it before.

Sugar Applebaum doesn’t hate the idea of spending a quiet summer at Sideling Springs, a sleepy Jewish resort in West Virginia, with her mother (who she adores) and her sister (who she does not), but she’s not exactly hyped about it. That is, until she crashes a staff party and meets Mara, the older, gorgeous, and acid-tongued dance instructor with very little patience for people with Sugar’s amount of privilege and supposed heterosexuality. But Mara’s dance partner, Tristan, is getting top surgery and can’t perform, and she needs a way to replace him without anyone noticing. Guess who’s the only volunteer?

“Lyricism with a punk rock edge.” —Mary Helen Specht, author of Migratory Animals

When tragedy strikes, Cassidy, a cam girl living in Southern California, must return to the small West Virginia town she left behind. Cassidy likes her job getting naked for men on camera, though she prefers sex with women. She never came out to her family or friends back in her home state—not about her sexuality and certainly not about her sex work. Now, she must figure out how to hold on to the life she’s built for herself while picking up the pieces of her fractured family.

After unwillingly becoming a vampire, Faith is forced to start anew in a different town with hopes of avoiding trouble and finishing out her last year of high school.

Initially wanting nothing more than to keep her head down, her fragile peace is shattered when she meets Mira.

Mira is a small-town pariah, having fallen from grace for something seemingly unforgivable – but everyone’s lips are sealed. Despite their instant attraction, Faith tries to avoid the charming outcast, but fate seems destined to entangle them.