Amy Scribner

FictionPopular Fiction

Nine Perfect Strangers

Review by Amy Scribner

The Tranquillum House seems like the ideal place for rest, relaxation and repair. Owned by Masha, a former high-powered executive who switched careers after a heart attack, the bucolic wellness center is a refuge for broken souls with deep pockets.

There’s Frances, the semifamous romance novelist who is hitting a midcareer slump; Jessica and Ben, lottery winners whose good fortune is ruining their marriage; the Marconi family, reeling from the loss of their son; and Carmel, a mother of four daughters whose husband left her for a younger woman. They’ve all gathered for 10 massage- and hike-filled days at the center.

But Masha is toying with introducing a new protocol to her strictly regimented program. It’s risky, but if it yields the results she expects, it’ll put Tranquillum House—and her—on the map. If it fails, it could put her guests in danger. As the guests start to suspect they’re getting more than they paid for, they must decide how much they’re willing to do in the name of wellness.

Liane Moriarty is simply unparalleled at infusing flawed characters with humor and heartbreak. Her singular brand of storytelling was most recently showcased when her bestselling novel Big Little Lies was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Nine Perfect Strangers is a worthy follow-up, offering an irresistible take on our wellness-obsessed culture, where the weirder the treatment, the better.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Tranquillum House seems like the ideal place for rest, relaxation and repair. Owned by Masha, a former high-powered executive who switched careers after a heart attack, the bucolic wellness center is a refuge for broken souls with deep pockets.

Memoir

Dear America,

Review by Amy Scribner

“This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in,” writes America’s most famous undocumented immigrant. “This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by.”

Faced with poverty and few choices, Jose Antonio Vargas’ mother sent him from the Philippines to Los Angeles to live with his grandparents when he was 12. Vargas had no idea he was undocumented until he applied for a driver’s permit at age 16.

“This is fake,” the DMV employee whispered to him after examining his green card. “Don’t come back here again.”

Vargas found himself in a legal no-man’s land: His passport and green card were fake. He couldn’t go back to the Philippines without potentially getting his legally residing California relatives in trouble for lying. Even with these tremendous barriers, Vargas took advantage of the opportunities he did have. He tirelessly studied, and with the support of friends, made it through college and into the world of journalism. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Yet despite years as a productive, law-abiding and taxpaying American resident, Vargas has no way of becoming an American citizen. He cannot access government-funded health care, vote, get financial aid for higher education or get a passport. He is constantly told to “get in line” and become a citizen the right way, even though our byzantine policies provide no road for him to do so. In June 2011, the New York Times Magazine published Vargas’ essay about his life as an undocumented immigrant. Overnight, Vargas became the face of one of the most divisive issues in America today.

Dear America, is a clarion call for humanity in a time of unprecedented focus on the 11 million people living in America without a clear path to citizenship. Vargas writes passionately about the undeniable intersection between race, class and immigration and traces the bitter history of American immigration policy. He speaks on behalf of our neighbors, our colleagues, those undocumented humans we interact with every day—often unknowingly—who are part of our community while always standing on the outside.

“This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like me find ourselves in,” writes America’s most famous undocumented immigrant. “This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by.”
FictionHistorical Fiction

Love Is Blind

Review by Amy Scribner

Brodie Moncur, the protagonist of William Boyd’s latest novel, has a gift: His perfect pitch and attention to detail make him a once-in-a-generation piano tuner, employable anywhere in the world. He takes his skills from Edinburgh to Paris and St. Petersburg, working with some of the most renowned musicians of the late 19th century. Even bloody bouts of tuberculosis don’t dim his prospects.

But his brilliance is threatened by his love for an unattainable woman. Lika Blum, a mediocre Russian singer, lives with John Kilbarron, one of Brodie’s main clients. Brodie is drawn to Lika’s blonde beauty, her kindness and the way she fills him with contentment “like a powerful liquor; like some ambrosial, aphrodisiacal tonic invading every blood vessel and capillary in his body.”

Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that Brodie gives in to his feelings at his own peril. Kilbarron is a drunk and a drug user, and his manager brother is not above threats to get the best deal for his brother—and himself. After their illicit love affair turns deadly, Brodie and Lika find themselves on the run across Europe, and Lika faces a terrible choice to ensure her lover’s safety.

Boyd, the author of more than a dozen novels, including Any Human Heart and A Good Man in Africa, is exceptionally good at evoking a vivid sense of place. He takes us to the gloomy Scottish countryside and the Mediterranean shores of Nice, enveloping the reader in a time in European history when horses are being replaced by cars, women still have few choices, and men can settle their feuds without the interference of law. Love Is Blind is a cautionary tale in how passion can both lift up and destroy lives.

Brodie Moncur, the protagonist of William Boyd’s latest novel, has a gift: His perfect pitch and attention to detail make him a once-in-a-generation piano tuner, employable anywhere in the world. He takes his skills from Edinburgh to Paris and St. Petersburg, working with some of the most renowned musicians of the late 19th century. Even bloody bouts of tuberculosis don’t dim his prospects.

NonfictionBiography

The First Lady America needed

Review by Amy Scribner

Betty Ford has become so closely tied with her eponymous addiction treatment center that it’s easy to forget that she was an extraordinary woman for many other reasons. Lisa McCubbin’s insightful portrait is admiring without being fawning, candid without a whiff of tabloid salaciousness.

Ford grew up in the Midwest as Betty Bloomer. An aspiring modern dancer, she was a beauty who had her eyes set on New York City and the studio of Martha Graham. But her adolescence was not idyllic: Betty’s father struggled to hold down a job, and he committed suicide when she was in her teens. Pressured by her mother to return home to Grand Rapids after a brief stint in Manhattan, Betty found herself in an unhappy—and likely abusive—marriage. Although divorces were rare in the 1940s, Betty put an end to what she called “the five-year misunderstanding.”

Mutual friends introduced Betty to Gerald “Jerry” Ford, a handsome local lawyer and former football star at the University of Michigan. Thus began a deep, lifelong romance that carried them through the exhilaration of raising a family and the sorrows of Kennedy’s assassination and Watergate.

When Jerry took the presidential oath of office in one of the darkest times in American history, Betty quickly became a beloved and admired figure. She was an outspoken and slyly funny woman who spoke openly of her battle with breast cancer, her views on parenting and, later, her own alcoholism and addiction to pills.

“While being First Lady was certainly not a position Betty Ford had ever aspired to, let alone imagined she might become, as it turned out, she was exactly what America needed,” McCubbin writes.

A journalist and co-author of several bestselling memoirs from Secret Service agents, McCubbin has deftly unearthed stories from those close to Betty Ford: her children, friends and former employees. The result is a vivid picture of a singularly influential woman.

Editor’s Note: This review has been edited to reflect that Gerald Ford did not play the quarterback position at the University of Michigan.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Betty Ford has become so closely tied with her eponymous addiction treatment center that it’s easy to forget that she was an extraordinary woman for many other reasons. Lisa McCubbin’s insightful portrait is admiring without being fawning, candid without a whiff of tabloid salaciousness.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

A family flung apart

Review by Amy Scribner

Reporters dub the McClouds “the saddest family in Mercy, Oklahoma,” after a tornado ravages the town, leaving the four McCloud kids orphaned. The oldest, Darlene, sets aside her college plans to take care of her younger sisters, Cora and Jane, and brother Tucker, and they settle into a dismal, cramped, government-issued trailer on the outskirts of town. The family is barely scraping by when Tucker vanishes after a vicious fight with Darlene.

“Tucker simply disappeared,” author Abby Geni writes. “He tumbled into the blue like a pebble dropped into a pond—out of sight, the ripples stilling, the surface of the water growing opaque.”

He resurfaces three years later to reclaim 9-year-old Cora. The two take off on an interstate journey that turns into a crime spree as Tucker transforms into an increasingly unhinged ecoterrorist. Darlene, meanwhile, starts a tentative relationship with the policeman assigned to her brother’s case as they track crimes throughout Oklahoma and Texas that could be Tucker’s work: arson at a taxidermy shop, the shooting of the owner of a poultry processing company, and finally, a crime in California so catastrophic that it threatens Cora’s—and Tucker’s—very existence.

Geni, author of the critically acclaimed The Lightkeepers, is an astonishing storyteller who brings the sun-baked plains of Oklahoma to life on every page. The narrative toggles seamlessly between Darlene, a girl forced to grow up overnight, and Cora, a girl torn between her adulation for her long-absent older brother and her increasing awareness of his danger to her. The Wildlands is perfectly of its time, when humans are more alert than ever to our impact on the world around us.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Abby Geni for The Wildlands.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Reporters dub the McClouds “the saddest family in Mercy, Oklahoma,” after a tornado ravages the town, leaving the four McCloud kids orphaned. The oldest, Darlene, sets aside her college plans to take care of her younger sisters, Cora and Jane, and brother Tucker, and they settle into a dismal, cramped, government-issued trailer on the outskirts of town. The family is barely scraping by when Tucker vanishes after a vicious fight with Darlene.

NonfictionMemoir

Reflections from a former White House staffer

Review by Amy Scribner

Recent Wesleyan grad Beck Dorey-Stein swore she would spend no more than three months in Washington, D.C., a place she calls “an ego swamp of a city.” Then she lands a job as a White House stenographer, a position she didn’t even realize existed.

From the Corner of the Oval is Dorey-Stein’s effervescent memoir that recounts spending five wide-eyed years traveling the world on Air Force One, producing transcripts of President Barack Obama’s press conferences and speeches. She joins a team of D.C. insiders who hopscotch the globe, from Senegal to Tanzania to Stonehenge, all in service to their country and to the man they call POTUS.

“The people who make the president look good on these trips often look terrible and feel even worse,” Dorey-Stein writes. “It is degrading and embarrassing and awkward when a twenty-two-year-old advance person scolds you for disappearing to the bathroom, and when you’re so hungry you eat three bags of stale cookies in front of a vanful of trigger-happy photographers. Civility takes a backseat to survival as you chug water, throw elbows and down half a bottle of Advil. You work through the pain to keep up with the action. Ballets are full of bloody slippers.”

Yet the few chosen to serve the president also form intense bonds, and they get a front seat to history. Dorey-Stein and her colleagues bear witness to the White House response to the tragedy of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. She forms a tight band of friends within “the Bubble”—her name for the president’s cliquish traveling entourage—and she begins an ill-fated romance with a magnetic yet noncommittal senior staffer.

Dorey-Stein offers a generous, vivid portrait of what it’s like to work at the epicenter of power when your job is to stay out of the spotlight. She navigates heartbreak, career indecision and friendship like virtually every 20-something. But unlike other young women, she does it all in the shadow of the White House.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Recent Wesleyan grad Beck Dorey-Stein swore she would spend no more than three months in Washington, D.C., a place she calls “an ego swamp of a city.” Then she lands a job as a White House stenographer, a position she didn’t even realize existed.

FictionPopular Fiction

A perfect life disrupted

Review by Amy Scribner

Nina Browning’s days are filled with the typical activities of Nashville’s wealthiest residents: “Meetings and parties and beauty appointments and workouts and tennis games and lunches, and, yes, even some very worthwhile charity work.” She has lavish homes and designer clothes, and her husband, Kirk, is a tech titan—albeit one with a fondness for bourbon and long business trips.

The Brownings have it all, and the best part is that their only child, Finch, has just been accepted to Princeton (sure, a check to the university endowment may have greased the wheels). But their elite world comes crashing down when Finch is accused of texting his buddies a partially nude photo of a passed-out girl at a party, along with a racist comment. Finch is at the mercy of his private school’s disciplinary committee, and his Ivy League future is in jeopardy.

Kirk’s reaction is to protect their son at any cost. But Nina finds herself seeking answers as to why Finch would have done what he did. She is drawn to the young girl in the photo and desperate to make things right. Nina’s own past resurfaces as she probes what really happened that night at the party and what it means for her family’s future.

Emily Giffin is the bestselling author of many beloved novels, including Something Borrowed and First Comes Love. Giffin draws the reader in like few storytellers can, and All We Ever Wanted is no exception. She effortlessly captures the voices of a struggling single father, a strong yet vulnerable teenage girl and a mother desperate to know the truth about her own child.

All We Ever Wanted is a deeply moving cautionary tale about the perils of privilege.

Nina Browning’s days are filled with the typical activities of Nashville’s wealthiest residents: “Meetings and parties and beauty appointments and workouts and tennis games and lunches, and, yes, even some very worthwhile charity work.” She has lavish homes and designer clothes, and her husband, Kirk, is a tech titan—albeit one with a fondness for bourbon and long business trips.

NonfictionNatureEssays

Meditations on seeds planted and green thumbs

Review by Amy Scribner

You need not be a devoted gardener to enjoy this slim, lovely volume from the consistently superb Penelope Lively. Life in the Garden is an ode to “chocolate earth in our nails,” as Virginia Woolf said. Lively has been a voracious gardener her entire adult life, and it shows in her nearly encyclopedic knowledge of gardening.

Yet this is not a traditional gardening book. You won’t find tips for slug removal, growing roses or mulching. And thank goodness for that, because Lively has so much more to say about the relevance of gardens. In literature, Lively points out, a garden often sets the backdrop for a scene, like the gardens of Edith Wharton’s novels, or becomes a character in its own right, as in the children’s classic The Secret Garden. She writes about the fundamental absurdity of gardens, of trying to impose order on nature, a losing battle if there ever was one. And she compares the charms of urban gardens—she currently lives in a London townhouse—with the sprawl of suburban and rural ones.

Lively’s trademark British wit makes several delightfully acidic appearances, but Life in the Garden is also at times almost unbearably poignant, coming as late as it does in the life of the wonderfully prolific author.

“We are always gardening for a future; we are supposing, assuming, a future,” she writes. “I am doing that at eighty-three; the Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ I have just put in will outlast me, in all probability, but I am requiring it to perform while I can still enjoy it.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You need not be a devoted gardener to enjoy this slim, lovely volume from the consistently superb Penelope Lively. Life in the Garden is an ode to “chocolate earth in our nails,” as Virginia Woolf said. Lively has been a voracious gardener her entire adult life, and it shows in her nearly encyclopedic knowledge of gardening.

FictionLiterary Fiction

After another American school shooting

Review by Amy Scribner

This prescient, achingly real novel comes on the heels of the latest school massacre in Parkland, Florida, where 17 high school students and teachers died on Valentine’s Day.

How to Be Safe explores the many questions that crop up, clockwork-style, after every all-too-frequent American school shooting: Was the shooter bullied? Whose gun did he use? Why is the shooter always a white male? Would a good guy with a gun have stopped the bad guy? How did everyone miss the red flags? How does the community heal and more forward?

Former English teacher Anna Crawford is still licking her wounds after being suspended from her job when she hears that the unthinkable has happened in her town of Seldom Falls, Pennsylvania: A kid entered the school and mowed down his classmates. In the confusing aftermath, Anna briefly finds herself a person of interest. Everyone knows her complicated history: She is a local girl whose brother has done stints in jail for drug crimes, and her father killed himself when she was 24. Sometimes she says strange things. Sometimes she drinks. Like so many women, she’s been abused and mistreated by men.

Reporters crawl all over the town, flashing Anna’s picture on television screens until police exonerate her. But even after she’s cleared, Anna’s view of Seldom Falls—and its view of her—has changed forever.

Despite its searing subject matter, How to Be Safe is beautifully written. It’s also occasionally funny (a state senator declares, “As of this day, we are declaring an all-out war on violence.”). Author Tom McAllister (The Young Widower’s Handbook) presents a clear indictment of modern America’s sickness: a toxic mix of disappearing jobs and opioids and misogyny and isolation and violence. He’s not afraid to give voice to the issue that so many politicians step around. As he makes clear, there are solutions.

Instead, the town arms its teachers and debates what the inevitable memorial will look like. “Each memorial represents a collective commitment not to remembering, but to whitewashing the memories, to creating a more palatable version of the memory for ourselves to hold on to and repeat and eventually accept as the truth,” Anna says. “The memorials were there to hide failures, not to be critical of them. Every memory is false, and with each subsequent remembering, it becomes even more false.”

This prescient, achingly real novel comes on the heels of the latest school massacre in Parkland, Florida, where 17 high school students and teachers died on Valentine’s Day.

NonfictionEssays

Notes on modern womanhood

Review by Amy Scribner

Hannah Horvath—Lena Dunham’s character on HBO’s “Girls”—famously declared, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation.”

But while the erstwhile Hannah never lived up to that sweeping statement, Sloane Crosley is getting close, consistently delivering since her bestselling 2008 debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. With her hilarious and astute observations, Crosley’s writing has garnered comparisons to heavyweights like Nora Ephron and David Sedaris. Her latest collection covers everything from fertility to vertigo, and it carries a newfound heft that can only be gained with age and experience.

Like Sedaris, Crosley allows her essays to unfurl slowly and deliciously. Judging by the opening sentence of “If You Take the Canoe Out” (“The strongest impulse I’ve ever had to ride a baggage carousel was at the airport in Santa Rosa, California.”), I assumed that the essay would be about traveling. It sort of is, but it’s also about writing, marijuana and swingers.

The most personal essay in the collection may be “The Doctor Is a Woman,” in which Crosley recounts having her eggs harvested and frozen. “[O]ne day I was walking up my apartment stairs, flipping through my mail, when I came across a thin envelope with the cryobank’s logo,” she writes. “My eggs had never sent me actual mail before. Camp is fun. We are cold.” Once she’s endured the frankly horrifying process of attaining the eggs, Crosley is uncertain of her next move. “They are just floating fractions of an idea,” she writes. “I know that. But I had never seen a part of my body exist outside my body before. I felt such gratitude.”

Crosley’s writing crackles with wit and humanity. Look Alive Out There reaffirms her place as one of the most generous essayists writing today.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hannah Horvath—Lena Dunham’s character on HBO’s “Girls”—famously declared, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation.” But while the erstwhile Hannah never lived up to that sweeping statement, Sloane Crosley is getting close, consistently delivering since her bestselling 2008 debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A family portrait

Review by Amy Scribner

Growing up in the shadow of his larger-than-life father—the artist Bear Bavinsky—Pinch has always been in the role of admirer. It’s the role, in fact, of nearly everyone in Bear’s orbit: his many wives and lovers, his 17 children, his ardent fans. They admire his work, marvel at his big personality and ignore his infidelities and shortcomings as a parent of children scattered around the globe.

Pinch grows up in Rome, his mother a Canadian potter who manages to beguile Bear for a few years before he decamps for New York and his next family. Pinch is a quiet boy, not fully embraced by the Italian children in his neighborhood because of his exotic North American background and unorthodox family. He turns to the canvas, first mimicking his father’s distinctive style before finding his own point of view. By the time he is a gawky 15-year-old, he is painting daily, his own kind of awkward teenage love affair. “Pinch hesitates at the brink—then kisses color to canvas, first a peck, bristles probing as he stoops to the easel, which he has not yet raised to his new adolescent height.”

But then Pinch brings a painting to New York for Bear’s assessment.

“Son of mine, I think the world of you. You know that,” Bear tells him. “So I got to tell you, kiddo. You’re not an artist. And you never will be.”

Pinch tucks his canvases away, settling into a life of academia, only returning to painting decades later in a risky attempt to cement the Bavinsky legacy—his father’s and his own.

Tom Rachman is the author of the indescribably good 2010 bestseller The Imperfectionists. The Italian Teacher is another superbly poignant novel featuring deeply imperfect people making deeply human decisions. It is about loyalty, the power and pretension of art and, most of all, the ties that bind.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Growing up in the shadow of his larger-than-life father—the artist Bear Bavinsky—Pinch has always been in the role of admirer. It’s the role, in fact, of nearly everyone in Bear’s orbit: his many wives and lovers, his 17 children, his ardent fans. They admire his work, marvel at his big personality and ignore his infidelities and shortcomings as a parent of children scattered around the globe.

NonfictionMemoir

Stories from the front line

Review by Amy Scribner

Former Marine and current college writing instructor Matt Young relives his grueling Marine training and his three deployments to Iraq in this searing memoir. His months in the desert are a fever dream of fiendish insects, extreme temperatures, tedium and terror.

Young enlists in the Marines without much forethought, walking into a strip mall recruitment center after drunkenly crashing his car, drawn to the belief that “the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war.” He leaves behind his “broken and distant” family and a young fiancée who is just heading off to college. He, at 18, is also just a kid.

For the most part, Young sidesteps any direct judgment of the war, but his writing makes clear the toll the war took on him personally. Young describes a tumbling Humvee that hits an improvised explosive device; a liquor-soaked 96-hour leave during which he struggles to talk to his family about anything other than combat; shooting dogs while on patrol, then being haunted by that act. “It’s important to remember our boredom and lack of sleep and anger and sadness and youth and misunderstanding and loneliness and hate,” Young writes.

And that is the uncompromising essence of Eat the Apple: Young is unflinching, even slightly removed as he examines the most brutally personal moments of his years in service. Sometimes he writes in the first person, sometimes in the second. He incorporates sketches of his body along with self-diagnoses of his physical and psychic pain, which are insightful rather than self-indulgent. And he pays tribute to those he served with, including those who came home broken or didn’t come home at all: “We didn’t die, but there are those who did, and regardless of who they were as men they should be remembered.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Former Marine and current college writing instructor Matt Young relives his grueling Marine training and his three deployments to Iraq in this searing memoir. His months in the desert are a fever dream of fiendish insects, extreme temperatures, tedium and terror.

NonfictionMemoir

Life at rock bottom

Review by Amy Scribner

Jennifer McGaha and her husband, David, were living the American dream in North Carolina: big house, private school for their kids—and debt. Mountains of debt. David, an accountant, shielded Jennifer from just how dire the situation was. But when the government came knocking for a staggering amount of back taxes, Jennifer and David had no choice but to foreclose on their dream home and move to a family-owned cabin in an Appalachian holler.

“Cabin” might actually be a charitable description for the barely inhabitable place in which they find themselves. Abandoned for years, the leaky structure is overrun with mice, snakes and other critters. Deep in the mountains, the surrounding area is starkly beautiful but dark and damp from a nearby waterfall.

The shell-shocked couple sets about making the house into a home and learning how to live off the land. Still reeling, Jennifer flees when a temporary teaching job materializes at a college in Illinois, where she faces her crushing (if unfair) disappointment at David’s inability to rescue their finances. “On the one hand, you know you and your husband are having trouble paying the bills,” she writes. “On the other hand, you believe this is not actually a problem, that the money is there somewhere and your husband just needs to look harder to find it. And when the money doesn’t materialize, you are astounded, your fantasy world obliterated.”

She returns at the end of the semester determined to make life in Appalachian North Carolina work. Enter chickens, then goats, as Jennifer and David work to produce their own food. While the first half of the book finds the author in a state of paralysis, the second half reveals her efforts to first reconcile herself to and then find simple pleasures in her new life. She learns to make cheese and soap, to help a goat give birth, to forgive her husband and herself.

Flat Broke with Two Goats is a brave book written in beautifully unflinching detail. McGaha lays bare the flaws in her marriage, the poor choices that led them to rock bottom and how they found their way to a new definition of home.

Jennifer McGaha and her husband, David, were living the American dream in North Carolina: big house, private school for their kids—and debt. Mountains of debt. David, an accountant, shielded Jennifer from just how dire the situation was. But when the government came knocking for a staggering amount of back taxes, Jennifer and David had no choice but to foreclose on their dream home and move to a family-owned cabin in an Appalachian holler.

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