Genesis Road by Susan O’Dell Underwood

Those not previously aware will notice on the first page that this is a poet writing, and be grateful. Cocke County, Tennessee, is real, but the characters and a road there called Genesis are fiction. That is the perfect name for the road where Glenna Daniels lived at the foot of English Mountain (real) until she was ten and her home burned down. That disaster was the genesis of Glenna’s distrust of her father, Glen, and the source of her will to survive and the beginning of the reader’s wonder of what else will emerge in the life of this compelling protagonist. The story begins when Glenna is thirty-six with a dramatic scene that encapsulates a miscarriage, divorce, and her father’s death in another house fire. Never again reaching that great a crescendo, the novel still is action-packed throughout. Homeless after this fire, Glenna agrees to embark on a cross-country trip with Carey, a gay man she protected from bullies when they were kids. Their life stories are told as they converse