The Last Innocent Year

A young girl creeps toward adulthood against a backdrop of the discovery of a missing child’s body. A family aches for easier times as they watch an eldest daughter slip away in haze of mental illness and religion. A woman grapples with past trauma that haunts her marriage. Across the seven stories that comprise The Last Innocent Year, Kerry Jones plunges readers into one heartbroken life after another. Girls on the cusp of womanhood search for meaning in a frightening world that doesn’t make sense, and grown women scour their pasts for clues that might help them unlock a better present. Though layered with references to 80s pop music and classic cinema, these stories aren’t nostalgic—they quietly rage against past cruelties in an attempt to find meaning.

Kerry Jones was raised in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, attended Mansfield University and Temple University, and received her MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University, where she now teaches. Her fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Orchid, Night Train, The Rambler, Bryant Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seems, and SLAB.