num_pages: 304
description: Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriends ideas for living off the land. Too soon with winter coming he calls it quits. Helped by Rudyher government-questioning wisdom-spouting seasonal-affective-disordered bossand a neighbor couple Helen makes it to spring. Those neighbors Karen and Lily are awaiting the arrival of their first child a boy which means their time at the Womens Land Trust must end.So Helen invites the new family to throw in with hertheyll split the work and the food build a house and make a life that sustains them if barely for years. Then young Perley decides he wants to go to school. And Rudy sets up a fruit-tree nursery on the pipeline easement edging their land. The outside world is brought clamoring into their makeshift family.Set in a region known for its independent spirit Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family to live well to make peace with nature and make deals with the system. It is a protest novel that challenges our notions of effective action. It is a family novel that refuses to limit the term. And it is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. Best of all it is full of flawed cantankerous flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn't the end of love but the real beginning.Absorbingly spun perfectly voiced and disruptively political Madeline ffitch's Stay and Fight forces us to reimagine an Appalachiaand an Americawe think we know. And it takes us laughing and fighting into a new understanding of what it means to love and to be free.
language: English
title: Stay and Fight
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux