Long Gone, Come Home: A Novel of Cincinnati by Monica Chenault-Kilgore

Long Gone, Come Home by Monica Chenault-Kilgore

Published: 2023
Acquired: July 2025
Read: November 2025

I try to collect and read books set in my hometown of Cincinnati, a project my sister has embraced by tracking them down and buying them for me for birthdays and Christmas. Most recently, she got me this book, a piece of historical fiction set in the early twentieth century. Birdie is a young black woman working in a factory in Mt. Sterling (a Kentucky community east of Lexington) and living with her family; she has two sisters and an imposing mother but doesn't know who her father is. She falls in love with a man her mother disapproves of—and with good reason, when he proves himself to be an unreliable husband and father.

Birdie's travels take her initially to Chicago, and then to Cincinnati, where most of the second half of the novel takes place. It's a different time and a different angle on Cincinnati than a lot of the other books I've read, and I appreciated that a lot. Birdie works as a servant to the rich whites of Cincinnati; she spends her evening in the black nightclubs listening to cutting-edge music of the Jazz Age; she resides in a boarding house with strict rules about male visitors. It was all interesting to see.

The novel otherwise is basically okay, written well enough. I enjoyed reading about Birdie's attempts to find her own place in the world, and there were some great bits, and some other bits that felt hastily gone over. Unfortunately, the book kind of fizzles out; Birdie doesn't really make many interesting decisions in the last third, more just lives her life while events resolve themselves around her. I think a different ending could have sold me on it more.