Sacrifice

Sacrifice

Laurel Mae Blair thinks she's finally found her escape from her hometown in Eastern Kentucky: she's going to marry and her future husband will earn lots of money and leave the mountains forever. But her new life isn't all that she imagined, and Laurel Mae finds herself growing wise not in the ways of "high-society" life but in being herself--authentically.

Readers of Sue Griffith Smith's novel Sacrifice will delight in the evolution of Laurel from self-centered young woman into a caring person who recognizes and appreciates the blessings in her experiences and family.

The people in Smith's Appalachia are not the one-dimensional characters of so many other books and movies about Kentucky and Virginia. Smith infuses every passage in Sacrifice with the truth she and her family have experienced in the coal mining region of the Southeastern United States. Some of her characters, based on real people, leave the area, and some stay, but all are strong, proud, resilient people who survive oppression, never losing sight of what is important, a message all readers of Sacrifice will know as they turn the last page.

Sue Griffith Smith has written freelance for local publications, educational journals, and newsletters since earning her undergraduate degree in journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington. Sacrifice, her debut novel, was written while completing her graduate degree in creative writing at Antioch University - Midwest, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Though her family is from Eastern Kentucky, she is a lifetime resident of Indiana. She lives in a log house in the woods with her husband, daughter, and black lab, Maddie.