When Angels Rest

The children of Stay More, Arkansas, play war games during World War II, but when soldiers preparing for an invasion of Japan occupy the hills, the real war reaches closer to home and the village takes on a new appearance

Donald Harington is one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America. Everywhere, his work is full of mystery and heartbreak kept afloat by high spirits, sensual pleasure, and intellectual joy.

Fans of Harington's (Butterfly Weed) fictional town of Stay More, Ark., will appreciate the latest escapades set in this quirky, backwater locale during WWII, where games of Allies and Axis warfare have replaced cowboys and Indians. In a place that distinguishes between only two social classes, "the poor, and the dirt poor," the town's young people fill their free time with battles, plots and counterplots as they watch Stay More's young men leave town for the real things. Twelve-year-old Dawny, inveterate observer and voyeur, writes up local events in his own weekly newspaper, the Stay Morning Star, while making frequent asides to his audience, "Gentle Reader," and offering amusing observations about the legendary antics of the Dinsmores, Dingletoons, Ingledews and Coes. The author's wit comes to the fore when an army detail lands in Stay More for Pacific theater training and the real war games escalate. Seen through Dawny, this is a poignant coming-of-age tale, not only for him and the town's young people but also for a nation whose innocence is sorely tested by the loss of a president and the harrowing events overseas that bring death close to home. Harington maintains the breezy originality that makes his 10th book a welcome addition to this talented writer's work.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

War games on the home front, the play and the anguish, are at the center of this wry, humane novel set in Stay More, a dying town in the Ozark Mountains in the 1940s. The narrator, 12-year-old Donny, is an outsider in all the games: he's in the "Japs and Nazis" group; on the popular side are the bullies, the insiders, the Allies. Then history comes to town. Stay More is "occupied" by soldiers on maneuvers, practicing for the invasion of Japan. In a sense, the army invasion is the end of innocence, but this novel takes you far beyond such easy reversals. For all the farce of the kids' games, the naivete in the one-room schoolhouse, the kindness in the town and among some of the soldiers, there is always cruelty, and in the heartrending climax, a young girl's rape and murder shatter the town like a bomb. Those who want their history without nostalgia will read every hardscrabble sentence. Hazel Rochman