Walk through the door and leave all your problems behind … but you don’t know what’s on the other side. And once you leave, you’ll never come back. Will you go through?
Maren Walker told herself she wouldn’t need to sell pills for long, that it was only means to an end. But that end seems to be stretching as far away as the other side of Blackdamp County, Kentucky. There’s always another bill for Granny’s doctor, another problem with the car, another reason she’s getting nowhere.
She dreams of walking through her little door to leave it all behind. The doors have appeared to the people in her mountain town for as long as anyone can remember, though no one knows where they lead. All anyone knows is that if you go, you’ll never come back.
Maren’s mother left through her door when Maren was nine, and her shadow has followed Maren ever since. When she faces the possibility of escaping her struggles for good, Maren must choose just what kind of future she wants to build.
From critically acclaimed author Ashley Blooms, Where I Can’t Follow explores the forces that hold people in place, and how they adapt, survive, and struggle to love a place that doesn’t always love them back.
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“This fantastically real, absorbing novel explores what it would feel like to have an escape hatch from the hardships of life and the agonizing decision whether to leave everyone you love behind.”
— Good Housekeeping
“Bloom does a very deft job of world building and creating characters the reader becomes invested in.”
— Booklist“Haunting and hopeful…a magic so vivid it feels more like a memory than a work of fiction."
— Alix E. Harrow, author of The Once and Future WitchBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Ashley Blooms has published short fiction in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, among others, and her essay “Fire in My Bones” appeared in the Oxford American. Ashley is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the Tin House Winter Workshop and received her MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow from the University of Mississippi. She was raised in Cutshin, Kentucky, and now lives in Berea, Kentucky.
Julia Atwood is an actor and audiobook narrator who earned her bachelor's degree in classics and psychology from Wheaton College and her master's degree in acting from Brown University. She is currently based in New York City.