July 2016 – a day in the (reading) life

Sometimes a book affects you so deeply as to render you speechless, or nearly so. Other times, a book will fill you with so many thoughts, ideas, questions and so much inspiration that you want to shout from the highest elevation, “Read this book or else!” Sometimes a book accomplishes both feats simultaneously. Such a wonder is Tiffany McDaniel’s The Summer That Melted Everything, due out from St. Martin’s Press on Tuesday, July 26.

The Summer That Melted Everything

“The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat was not. It should’ve been expected, though. Heat is, after all, the devil’s name, and when’s the last time you left home without yours?” The devil’s name is also Sal, who arrives in Breathed, Ohio in the form of a young black boy who likes dogs and yearns for ice cream.

Sal comes to Breathed at the invitation of Autopsy Bliss (simply one of the most fabulous names in all of literature!), father of two and town prosecutor. But Fielding Bliss, Autopsy’s youngest son, encounters Sal first and invites him home: “If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.” And so begins a summer of blistering heat, rising paranoia, and childhood innocence lost.

Tiffany McDaniel spins her tale from the point of view of Fielding, who speaks as both his teenage self and as the ruined 84-year-old man he eventually becomes. As you begin to read The Summer That Melted Everything, you wonder how he ended up so hopeless and bitter. By the end of the book you know.

Breathed is populated with myriad characters, all deep and fully-fleshed: the aforementioned Autopsy; Dresden Delmar, an odd, introspective girl with a prosthetic leg; Fielding’s optimistic mom, Stella, with her global interior decorating skills and her phobic fear of rain and boiling things; rancorous, foul-mouthed Aunt Fedelia, whose method of staying cool in the heat is to lick her forearms; Elohim, a cruel midget whose paranoid leadership fosters hatred throughout the town; and finally, Grand Bliss – ah, lovely Grand with the perfect moniker – Fielding’s god-like, idolized older brother, who turns out to be just as human and tragic as any of us.

The Summer That Melted Everything is that rare book that I want to revisit yearly. It’s so incredibly meaningful and lush that you could read it many times over and each time gain something new and glorious from it. Passage after passage are both beautiful and painful at the same time.

Tiffany McDaniel’s book isn’t a joyful one and, in fact, can be downright depressing, reminding you of all of the evil in the world and the follies of misguided men. But the language sings and soars, and you still feel better somehow for having read it.

How many sentences, paragraphs, entire pages did I want to quote for this review, to memorialize for my own remembrances? Countless, but I only have so much space here and too many spoilers can ruin the wide-eyed experience of a new reader’s discovery. How many times did I cry tears inside while reading Fielding’s and Sal’s story, yet in some way it’s not a complete downer. I came away from the book wanting to be a better person and wanting to help others to be better people too.

I don’t know how to state it more clearly: The Summer That Melted Everything is an astonishing accomplishment for any writer, much less a debut author like Tiffany McDaniel. Equal parts Harper Lee and Shirley Jackson, with a dash of Ron Rash thrown in, McDaniel’s novel is destined to be a modern classic. It should be required reading for all high schoolers and/or college students for the lessons it teaches of tolerance and intolerance, and vanished innocence (though it’s most definitely NOT young adult/new adult lit), and it should mop up come literary awards season. If not, something is even more amiss with this already screwed-up world.

Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by St. Martin’s Press via NetGalley. I would like to thank the publisher and the author for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

Planetfall

Emma Newman’s Planetfall appears, at first blush, to be a straight-up, sci-fi colonization tale. A group of human space pioneers follows their leader, Suh, to an unnamed planet far, far from Earth. Once the colonists arrive on said unknown planet, Suh vanishes into a huge, odd plantlike structure found growing, or possibly built, there and dubbed “God’s city” by the settlers. Suh never reemerges from God’s city and becomes an oracle of sorts, believed to be still alive somewhere inside and called the Pathfinder by her disciples. She even becomes the subject of an odd pilgrimage a chosen colonist makes into God’s city as a yearly rite.

Twenty years later, when the events of Planetfall take place, the colonists are thriving, having quite successfully built a life for themselves on this anonymous rock spinning through space. You’ve got Mack, your strong, male colony leader with a secret. Helping to keep that secret, and hiding secrets of her own, is your female protagonist, Ren, the colony’s master printer (practically everything the colony needs to exist, including food, is created by 3-D printers, a concept I have yet to entirely get my head around). And you’ve got a wild card in Sung-Soo, a newcomer, offspring of two, long-thought dead, original colonists, and apparent grandson of Suh.

All’s good and usual in sci-fi land so far, right? So while you, the unsuspecting reader, are trucking along, engrossed in this, your latest spacey discovery, you begin to realize that Ren, the first-person narrator of Planetfall, is just a weeeeee bit different from your average planetary colonist. She’s fiercely private, she suffers from social anxiety and is a card-carrying introvert. Shoot, I could even relate a little . . . to a point . . . until it became clear that there was something very, very off with Ren. Hint: There’s a reality show showcasing people like Ren.

And this is where Planetfall becomes a different kind of colonization tale. I think it’s safe to say Emma Newman gets points for originality by incorporating a character with Ren’s particular disorder into her sci-fi work. I can’t say I particularly liked Ren, even though I could empathize with her at first. But her refusal to come to grips with her disease leaves me frustrated as she becomes increasingly more destructive to herself and the entire colony.

Newman has a new book coming out this fall, set in the same world as Planetfall. I’m curious to see where she heads for the next installment.

Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by PENGUIN GROUP Berkley, NAL / Roc via Netgalley. I would like to thank the publisher for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.