Shiner

you keep.

 

It's an autumn night, and the fire is lit. Moonshiners sneak in their final runs of whiskey while young women like me tell old tales. The sun sets early. Along the outskirts of Trap, you'll find me standing in a constellation of four-wheel-drive trucks in the woods behind the old Saw-Whet Motel. The mountains hover at my back.

 

The story of the snake handler's daughter began when I'd just turned fifteen. I knew little then of the outside world my father kept from me. Ours is an oral civilization, I used to hear him say, and it's dying. He blamed coal, he blamed heroin. He never blamed himself. He thought he had the only tales worth telling, and he never understood what my mother had run from all her life because she'd been born a woman-

 

The truth turns sour if it idles too long in our mouths. Stories, like bottles of shine, are meant to be given away.

 

I.

 

Snake Handler's Daughter

 

Bread and Ivy

 

It started with a burn, just like the stories of Moses my father used to tell. Moses, he said, was nothing more than a shepherd hiding in the hills until he scaled a mountain and found a flaming bush. Then he was never the same. My father had a tale just as magical, a story of his own origins as a man of God. He loved to tell it as much as my mother wished she hadn't ever believed it.

 

For as long as she was alive, she never told me her own story. I used to hear her whisper to her best friend, Ivy, that she wished she'd been known as anything other than Briar Bird's wife. I hated this about our life in the hills-mountain men steered their own stories, and women were their oars. I asked once if my mother had seen what lay beyond the bluffs, and she led me to the peak of our fields that overlooked the ravine behind my father's snake shed. In the distance I could see two razorback stone ridges rise from the trees. All my life these mountains had w

Times-bestselling author of Never Have I Ever

"In spare yet lyrical prose, Amy Jo Burns brings to life a brutal landscape and its dangerous, alluring inhabitants. A haunting glimpse into a strange, mystical world with its own laws and customs, filled with fiercely independent people, this novel combines a memoir-like intimacy with the mythic power of a fable. Burns is a writer to be watched." Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT bestselling author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World

"Amy Jo Burns writes masterful sentences charged with all the beauty and rage and struggle of her characters. From the first paragraph to the last, Burns builds a vibrant and complex story of myths and miracles and moonshiners, as well as of the women who fight for their lives and their dignity as their future in a culture that all too often strangles all three. Shiner is a gorgeous novel." Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment 

"Shiner is a lush, gripping novel that explores love, grief, rage, and regeneration in a small Appalachian community. A story that feels both out of time and of its time, I won't forget the haunting mood, place, and characters that Burns brings to life." Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

"A story as dark and twisty as the Appalachian mountains where it's set, SHINER is riveting and full of wonder. Amy Jo Burns takes us deep into a land both beautiful and treacherous, where men handle snakes and make moonshine, where woman navigate a world that needs their labor but denies their happiness, and where girls like Wren Bird must decide who to be in a place that wants them to be nothing...SHINER is part love story, part mystery, part family drama, and deeply rooted in place and character. I loved it." Anton DiSclafani, bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls and The After Party

"With prose as potent as the moonshine it evokes, Amy Jo Burns shows how ferociously Appalachian history keeps it hold on the present. Beautiful and unsettling, Shiner pulled me in with its first startling scene and wouldn't let go." Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew 

"Shiner is a book like a thunderstorm: weighty, emotional, romantic, and full of heat. It speaks to the energy and ambition of youth, in a voice unlike any we've seen before. Set in an Appalachian hillside that holds itself so remote it feels like a new civilization, Amy Jo Burns has introduced us to a world we will not soon forget. Her characters seek high truths and make hard choices, and they will linger in my mind for a long time to come." Adrienne Celt, author of Invitation to a Bonfire

This gorgeously written, plot-rich novel examines the complex lives of these five beautifully realized characters . . . Being set in Appalachia, it is no surprise that the novel is also about story and its gradual morphing into legend . . . This memorable first novel is exceptional in its power and imagination. It s clearly a must-read.  Booklist (Starred Review)
 
Wren s engaging, convincing voice leads the reader through her strange world. A teenage girl is the strong center of a fever-dream story of hidden pasts.    Kirkus (Starred Review)
 
Burns beautifully renders the isolated Appalachian landscape and the urgent desperation of her characters. Burns s stunning prose is reason enough to keep an eye out for this promising writer s next effort.  Publishers Weekly