RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksMadeline ffitch\'s debut novel, Stay and Fight, is immersive and compelling ... There is nothing flat or caricatured about the characters in ffitch’s novel. If Stay and Fight is concerned with representing America at all, then it is a damning picture—a place that resembles nothing of the meritocratic land of bounty and opportunity that exists in the national imaginary. America is, instead, a place hostile to the poor and to the unconventional, unconcerned with things like honest industry or merit. But, the novel is more interested in representing the complex lives of people who just happen to live in Appalachia ... a scene [is] so expertly written it makes the palms sweat ... ffitch has a knack for subverting expectations through character development ... assumptions are turned deftly upside down, and we’re left to question our own prejudices about people and place ... [The characters] refuse to be boiled down to the banal matter of wealth as so many from the region are.
