Meteors in August

Charged by lyrical prose and vivid evocations of a more-than-human world, Meteors in August proves itself a magnificent debut, a tale of despair and salvation in all their many forms

Lizzie Macon is seven when her father drives a Native American named Red Elk out of their valley and comes home with blood on his clothes. The following year, her older sister, Nina, cuts her head from every family photograph and runs away with Red Elk’s son and their unborn child. Nina’s actions have consequences no one could have predicted: jittery reverberations of violence throughout the isolated northern Montana mill town of Willis. Sparks of racial prejudice and fundamentalist fever flare until one scorching August when three cataclysmic events change the town—and Lizzie’s family—forever.

Bullied wives, maimed men, haters of Indians, exhibitionists, petty preachers and rebel congregations are among the northern Montana townspeople who grope for individual deliverance in the background of this exceptionally promising debut novel. Misfit Lizzie, its adolescent narrator, escapes her older sister's predicament--a teenage pregnancy that caused her to run away when Lizzie was still a child--and concludes: "I figured a girl wasn't going to get too many breaks in her life and that I'd better find a way to show God I was grateful." She is guided by the local Holy Roller ("Jesus might be kind, but God and Mrs. Graves were only merciful"), but observes that fire-and-brimstone goodness does not stave off catastrophe. Rather, she learns not to reject sin but to forgive it. These themes might seem syrupy in less able hands, but Thon's steely-eyed, sharpshooting prose brings both urgency and spontaneity to her characters and their conflicts. Lizzie's feelings of rejection, her determination and her perceptions of the stultifying rural squalor are wrenchingly palpable, and Thon is clearly a writer to watch.
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