Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning author Macy (Dopesick, 2018; Raising Lazarus, 2022), now based in Virginia, returned to her small hometown of Urbana, Ohio, for this memoir. She focuses on how the town has changed since her childhood in the seventies into a "poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place" and on her struggles to get along with siblings and old friends who've remained in the area and moved decidedly to the political right, while Macy has moved to the left. Covering 2023 and 2024, the author shares her memories of growing up poor with a hardworking mother and an alcoholic father while zooming in on several people in the present, including a trans student trying to make a go of it in college, a truant officer attempting to cover a county where students increasingly don't show up for school, and Macy's ex, a former journalist transformed from "the most liberal person I knew" to a "right-wing racist and antisemite." With compassion and energy, Macy mourns the decline of mainstream journalism and makes a plea for more funding for public education, particularly college education.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist and Dopesick author Macy poignantly interweaves her personal history with that of her decaying hometown in this perceptive account. Raised in blue-collar Urbana, Ohio, which teemed with factory jobs and good schools in the 1970s and '80s, Macy survived poverty and an alcoholic father with the help of the public library, family friends, and a job delivering newspapers that helped her pay for college. Returning in the 2020s to care for her ailing mother, Macy witnessed Urbana's "backward mobility," characterized by opioid addiction, declining educational opportunities, and rampant loneliness. As she recalls episodes from her complicated childhood, Macy attempts to diagnose the causes of Urbana's current dysfunction, considering the corrosive effects of cable news, social media, and crumbling unions on the community that helped her achieve her own imperfect version of the American dream. As she watches old friends become consumed by anti-immigrant rhetoric, including an ex-boyfriend who helped stir up attention around Haitian immigrants in Springfield during the 2024 election, Macy concludes that "the answer to our epidemic of loneliness isn't to seek solace in conspiracy theories; it's to participate in real life with other human beings." Timely, clear-eyed, and empathetic, her insights provide a welcome salve for a festering social wound. It's a sobering journey into America's splintered heartland. Photos. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Macy, a journalist turned author of three previous bestsellers, including Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, pens a memoir that examines both her personal history and the transformation of her hometown, Urbana, OH. Macy grew up in poverty, depending on her job delivering newspapers to pay her way through school. As her mother's health declines in 2020, Macy's frequent visits home reveal a town that she notes lacks civic pride and has a declining public school system and a population that embraces conspiracies rather than community. Reconnecting with relatives and old friends requires an agreement to avoid certain topics. Macy's narration lacks the polish of a professional voice actor, and her pacing is occasionally uneven. However, there is no doubt that no one else could have read this book more effectively. Her voice conveys deep empathy and compassion for people whose beliefs she cannot fully understand, lending the audiobook an authenticity that outweighs its imperfections. VERDICT Despite some rough edges in her narration, Macy shines when reading her own memoir. A topical, clear-eyed examination of shifting communities in the nation's heartland.--Christa Van Herreweghe
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A small-town success story returns to her Ohio home to take account of profound changes. "It's not as if Urbana had ever been utopia for me. I was among the poorest kids in my class, and I felt it." Macy, the author ofDopesick and other bestsellers, made her way out of poverty in the 1980s through a college degree funded by grants that largely no longer exist. Her latest nonfiction narrative chronicles her return home to try to see what would happen to a kid like her today, coming face to face with "the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place." Her reporting goes deep and wide, including her family members, old friends and teachers, and many new acquaintances. Central among them is recent high school graduate Silas James, one of the teens she identifies as "a modern-day me," though Silas is trans and has more abuse and trauma in his background than the author. Also memorable are an ex-boyfriend, once the most liberal person she knew, now a strident voice on an array of far-right talking points; on the other end of the spectrum is Brooke Perry, a deeply committed attendance officer whom she accompanies on harrowing rounds to try to get kids into school in a climate where education has lost its place as a tentpole of the American dream. The author does not shy away from tough personal stories, writing about a niece who was abused as a child by her stepfather. Macy goes into the toughest interviews with "trauma-informed advice," reminding herself that connecting about shared interests and noncontroversial topics will keep these conversations going much longer--though sadly, it often doesn't change the end result. Black-and-white photos of the interview subjects add an important dimension to the story. By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
