She was born on the Fourth of July 1976. The nurse tied a red-white-and-blue ribbon to her hospital bracelet and called her a firecracker. Her mother took her home to a holler in the Virginia coalfields and raised her on two rules: have something that's yours, and don't need anybody. Fifty years later, Lacey Brummett is still trying to figure out how to do both. She has a teenage son she shares with a man she was married to once. An almost-marriage to a second husband who can't quite say the things she needs to hear. A career in music she's all but abandoned. And a quiet, growing suspicion that the life she built to escape her mother's might be the same life in different clothes.

Then her mother collapses three days before Christmas. Lacey drives back to Pound, Virginia to a hospital room, a childhood house she hasn't slept in for years, and a drawer full of songs her mother wrote in private and never told anyone about. What she finds in that drawer makes her question every story she's been telling herself: about the father she lost, the mother who stayed, the man she's been waiting on, and the music she walked away from. By the time she leaves, she understands what her mother was trying to say. She also understands why she couldn't say it.

Bicentennial Baby is a literary Appalachian novel about inherited patterns, the cost of hope, and what a woman has to lay down at her father's grave before she can carry anything else. Set against the Virginia coalfields and a music career built one barroom at a time, it's a story about the mothers we run from, the men we mistake for safety, and the slow honest work of recognizing a life while you're still living it.

For listeners of Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Silas House, and Wiley Cash. A novel for anyone who has ever wondered whether they chose their life or just survived into it.