Stay tuned below for a review and excerpt of Just Get Home!

Author: Bridget Foley
Publisher: MIRA
Released: April 13^th, 2021
Received: NetGalley
Warnings: Rape, assault, affairs, abuse

Bridget Foley’s latest novel, Just Get Home is an emotionally compelling read, one that merges mystery, suspense, and thriller elements all into one.

Beegie and Dessa are two complete strangers. They couldn’t have less in common with each other if they tried. Yet one disaster is about to bring them together.

Beegie is a teenager hopping from foster home to foster home. Her life has been full of trauma and betrayal. Perhaps, in a way, that helped prepare her to survive the events that are about to happen. Though even she wasn’t expecting an earthquake to hit while she was on the bus.

Dessa is a single mom in desperate need of a night off. So that’s what she did – she hired a babysitter and went out with her friends. After all, one of her best friends is about to get married, which must be celebrated. Only…Dessa isn’t celebrating now. All she wants to do is make it home.

“Beegie had kept the bags because she’d been around long enough to know that sometimes it doesn’t work out.”

Just Get Home is a dark and dramatic tale that shows the lengths that two women can and will go through to make it home. This is a novel that shows the best and worst that humanity has to offer.

Before I begin my review, I should mention that many sensitive subjects come up in Just Get Home. Rape, assault, affairs, and abuse all play significant roles in what happens inside these pages, so consider yourself warned.

The story is told through two different perspectives, Beegie and Dessa. I love how different their views and experiences are. It makes for such a compelling read, even while it broke my heart at times (for Beegie’s sake, that is).

I’ll confess that it did take me a little while to get into Just Get Home, but I think once I was around three (ish) chapters in, I found myself invested in both of their stories. Though I was still trying to figure out their past – it took a while before I could puzzle it all together. Something that was clearly done with intent.

Just Get Home is so full of twists, turns, and surprises that it was almost difficult to keep up with at times. Almost. There’s no shortage of drama or terrifying scenarios in this tale. Not to mention plenty of heartbreaking revelations and moments to make a reader stop and think.

Thanks to MIRA and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Prologue

Assist the client in gathering possessions.

Beegie saw it written on a sheet Karen had in her folder. An unticked box next to it. 

She knew what it meant. Stuff. 

 But it was the other meaning that soothed her.

 The darker meaning. Possessions.

That was the one she worked over and over in her head.  

Beegie imagined her case worker holding up a grey little girl, face obscured by black hair and asking, “This one yours?”  Beegie would nod. Yes, that’s my monster. Together they would shove one snarling, demon-filled person after another into the garbage bags they had been given to pack her things. Soon the bags would fill, growing translucent with strain. When they were done, she and Karen would have to push down on the snapping, bloody faces of Beegie’s possessions so they could close the back of the Prius.  

But Karen’s box remained unticked. She didn’t get to help collect Beegie’s possessions, real or unreal, because Beegie’s stuff was already on the street when she got home. 

Two garbarge bags filled with nothing special. Her advocate standing next to them with her folder and its helpful advice for what to do when a foster gets kicked out of her home. 

Nothing special. 

Just almost everything Beegie owned in the world. 

Almost but not all. 

Whatever. 

After Karen dropped her off and Barb had shown her “Her New Home” and given her the rundown on “The Way It Works Here,” Beegie unpacked her possessions into a bureau that the girl who’d lived there before her had made empty, but not clean. 

The bottoms of the drawers were covered in spilled glitter. Pink and gold. Beegie had pressed the tips of her fingers into the wood to pull it up, making disco balls of her hands. 

But she failed to get it all. 

Months later, she would find stray squares of this other girl’s glitter on her clothes. They would catch the light, drawing her back to the moment when she’d finally given up on getting the bureau any cleaner and started to unpack the garbage bags. 

There had been things missing. 

That Beegie had expected. 

But what she had not expected was to find two other neatly folded garbage bags. These were the ones she had used to move her stuff from Janelle’s to the Greely’s. She had kept them, even though back then Mrs. Greely was all smiles and Eric seemed nice, and even Rooster would let her pet him. 

Beegie had kept the bags because she’d been around long enough to know that sometimes it doesn’t work out. 

In fact, most times it doesn’t work out. 

And you need a bag to put your stuff in and you don’t want to have to ask the person who doesn’t want you to live with them anymore to give you one. 

But when Mrs. Greely had gathered Beegie’s possessions, she had seen those bags and thought that they were important to Beegie. It made sense to her former foster mother that a “garbage girl” would treasure a garbage bag. 

This got Beegie thinking about stuff. The problem of it. The need for things to hold your other things. Things to fix your things. Things to make your things play.  

And a place to keep it all. 

In Beegie’s brain the problem of possessions multiplied, until she imagined it like a landfill. Things to hold things to hold things, all of it covered with flies, seagulls swooping. 

Everything she ever owned was trash or one day would be. 

Seeing things this way helped. It made her mind less about the things that hadn’t been in the bag… and other things. 

Beegie picked at ownership like a scab, working her way around the edges, flaking it off a bit at a time. Ridding herself of the brown crust of caring. 

Because if you care about something it has power over you. 

Caring can give someone else the ability to control you and the only real way to own yourself was let go.

So she did. 

Or she tried.  

Some things Beegie couldn’t quite shed. The want of them stuck to her like the glitter. The pain of their loss catching the light on her sleeves, flashing from the hem of her jeans. The want would wait on her body until it attracted her attention and then eluded the grasping edges of her fingers. 

Excerpted from Just Get Home by Bridget Foley, Copyright © 2021 by Bridget Foley. Published by MIRA Books.