House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. Fleeing her father's advances, she takes to the Mississippi road in a passage that, with its rough music, is pure Brown: She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince. Reared in migrant camps, tarpaper shacks, and, most recently, an abandoned cabin, Fay herself is pretty, goodhearted, astonishingly ignorant: in other words, trouble in a too-tight dress and a pair of rotting tennis shoes. And really, who could blame her? Fay's father, Wade Jones, was one of the most enduring villains in recent fiction, the kind of man who would trade a son for a car and a daughter's virginity for a few $20 bills. Larry Brown's Fay picks up at the precise moment when its 17-year-old heroine walks out of his 1991 novel Joe.
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