Road Out of Winter

Winter has come and stayed too long again. There is no spring for the second year in a row, and where there is no spring, there is no new life. Nothing will grow, no green shoots will emerge with the promise of better days. There is only cold and colder and even more cold unless you can find the Road Out of Winter.

Alison Stine’s novel centers on Wylodine, a poor girl with a thumb greener than all of the Appalachia. She learned the art of growing from a man she can’t legally call her stepfather, Ludo, known from states away as the best weed farmer around. Ludo has long since left Ohio and taken Wyl’s mother with him. Somewhere in California, they are supposedly making a life, and when the snow comes and doesn’t stop, Wyl knows she, too, must leave the mountains.

She picks up strays along the way, people as lost and desperate as she is, and she loses someone, too; a best friend who chooses a group known only as The Church over her. What Wylodine needs is unclear, but she knows she won’t find it unless she keeps moving.

If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, and Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers had a book baby, it would be Alison Stine’s brilliant Road Out of Winter. I couldn’t put it down.