The Weight of Sky

THE WEIGHT OF SKYA Novel of Leaving and LearningJosephine MarrowBefore Ruth Anne Colter ever left the mountain, she learned to leave it in small ways-memorizing the shape of a torn atlas page by lamplight, hiding it beneath a floorboard, imagining a world beyond the ridge that her father insisted did not need imagining. On the homestead he built above Bell Fork Creek, near a place called Given's Notch, he has spent two decades constructing a household out of his own private doctrine: rules for the planting, rules for the silence at the table, rules for what a daughter is and is not permitted to want. Ruth Anne has never had reason to question any of it. Until she does.When a scholarship carries her down out of the Larkspur Range and into Ashgrove Community College, Ruth Anne finds herself, for the first time, among people who ask her questions her family never taught her how to answer. A quiet, exacting mentor offers her something more than an education-a second language, a second self, and a warning that no one gets to keep both languages equally fluent forever. What Ruth Anne must decide, over the years that follow, is what she is willing to pay for the one she is choosing, and what of the old language she can bear to lose.The price turns out to be steeper than tuition. It is a sister who feels abandoned rather than proud. It is a mother whose love has always spoken through jars of preserves and sprigs of yarrow rather than words, and who may not know how to reach her daughter any other way. It is a father who will never offer the apology Ruth Anne sometimes lets herself hope for-and a homecoming, years later, that does not resolve so much as it endures.The Weight of Sky follows one young woman's slow, incomplete, deeply human passage between two worlds, and asks what we owe the people we come from once we have learned to speak a language they will never share.WRITTEN FOR readers who love literary fiction about first-generation strivers, complicated fathers, and the particular loneliness of straddling two homes-novels that trust an ending to be honest rather than tidy, and that find as much drama in a kitchen table as in anywhere else.This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.