Billie Starr's Book of Sorries

A Novel

By: Deborah E. Kennedy

Narrated by: Elizabeth Dwyer

Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

Shimmering with rage and sparkling with subtle humor, Billie Starr's Book of Sorries showcases Edgar Award-nominee Deborah E. Kennedy's singular voice as Jenny, a heroine in the vein of Olive Kitteridge in Crosby, Maine and Miles Roby in Empire Falls, shines a light on the town of Benson, Indiana, where lakes, grudges, and family rifts run deep—but so does a mother’s love.

Sometimes, a woman has to rescue herself.

Jenny Newberg, Queen of Bad Decisions, is about to make another one. In a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, down-on-her-luck single mother Jenny is on a first-name basis with the debt collector at the bank, who is moving toward foreclosure. She is constantly apologizing to her precocious young daughter, Billie Starr, who is filling a book with her mother’s sorries, and it seems to Jenny that no apology will ever be enough.

Then a pair of strangers in black suits offers her a hefty check to seduce someone known as the Candidate. Finally, something will go her way.

But nothing ever goes as Jenny plans, and she is swept into the Candidate’s orbit. Surrounded by a wide universe of new ideas, she realizes how constrained her life has been by the expectations of everyone around her, and she starts to see how much more she might be capable of. And when her world is rocked to its core and Billie Starr may be in danger, Jenny is forced to do what she once thought impossible: trust in herself and her own power to make things right.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

©2022 Deborah E. Kennedy (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Listened 3x!

What a clever story with a unique mix of characters. Please also enjoy Tornado Weather by the same talented author.

Great story, middling recording and vocal

Great sense of humor and grasp of middle America. Poor recording and middling performance.

A superb writer dumbs it down a bit

I loved Deborah Kennedy's Tornado Weather and belatedly realized she'd published a second novel, which I'd worried about because of the brutal concentration of fame and stardom in the publishing industry. Tornado Weather had a brilliant set of interlocking stories that showed the small-town midwest from a full range of angles. The key feature is that every character is a thinking, feeling intelligent person regardless of where they get stuck in society and how they are viewed by the people who think the town belongs to them. "Billie Starr" focuses on a single mother getting into her late twenties and her precocious daughter. They are broke, and there's lots of intelligent material about how hard it is to raise a kid under threat of eviction, patronizing non-help from family and community, and so on. Kennedy always writes very well. But the star of the show isn't the ensemble of the community this time and two things happen. First, the mother-daughter relation becomes contrived as it can't bear the weight of all the issues in play in the book (the Republican takeover of now deep-red Indiana is going on in the background, as is deindustrialization and growing precarity and spreading suburban white Christianity. Second, the townspeople and the politicians become less intelligent and more stereotyped. The story itself is good, but the characters are less so, including the mom at the center, who goes from Ms.Bad Choices to Ms. Marple in a frenzy of maternal angst. I'm really looking forward to Kennedy's third and more small-town intelligence, as she's clearly a major talent.