Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Nearly a hundred years after the Ice changed the face of our world, the people of Moline work to reclaim the frozen land. When real, honest-to-goodness dragons take up residence in the hills outside of town, the citizens are at a loss for how to deal with a problem the government won't believe exists.

David Anderson knows very little of the world outside of his family's farm, until Callan, an assistant healer from the southlands, arrives in Moline and begins to teach him of a world he never knew, full of books and ideas, and history long forgotten. When Callan is found in the arms of another man ~ a crime in this post-Ice world ~ David learns a frightening truth about himself, and the difference between what is legal ... and what is right. When trouble hits the nearby town of Crawford, David and Callan discover the seeds of a plot that affects not only their home, but towns just like Moline across the world. Now they must fight to save their home, not only from the dragons, but from a government that wants them dead!

BOOK REVIEW:
What a splendid surprise this novel is! Set in a richly imagined future, featuring themes of bigotry, reactionary religious fundamentalism, government predation, and the baffling appearance of dragons, this is a romance in the oldest sense. David’s story is a hero’s progress from ignorance to understanding, from innocence to experience, at great peril and against great odds, resolved at great cost and closing with well-tempered hope in a still-uncertain future.

But this is no picaresque adventure. The novel’s post-apocalyptic Virginia may resonate with elements of current events, but A Strong and Sudden Thaw is neither allegory nor cautionary tale. Its heroism is not clothed in triumphalism, but rather in the undeniable ~ and ambiguous ~ realism of the setting. How can a frozen future engineered by a cynical government, isolated communities mired in a fearful return to old-time religion, and dragons, of all things, be elements of a realistic plot? The novel is so deftly written, and so seamlessly plotted, that we readers don’t for a moment question the inevitability of each tragedy any more than we fail to sigh with relief at each escape or smile through a tear or two at the scant but significant victories.

Day writes in a straightforward style that belies the complexities of the plot and characters. The measured pace of the narrative reflects the pre-industrial conditions to which David’s part of the world has returned after a frozen century. The novel feels historical, in tone and structure. Even though we are introduced to the dragons within a page or two of lifting the cover, the lilting prose and bucolic setting lull us. There is great darkness here, but Day reveals it slowly, in graduated doses, such that by the time we reach the story’s climax we have been through the same developmental process as David; if we are not as changed as he is, at least we will not soon forget his tumultuous coming of age. Nor will we dismiss the lessons of the hard-won and incomplete truths at the heart of the conflict.

David’s first-person voice is itself a marvel of youthful vigor and countrified understatement (for example, he says of the man who will be his lover, “His smile was like an invitation to a harvest feast”). He lives a quiet life, hunting and farming with his family, but David himself is not a quiet character. He is full of curiosities that will never be satisfied within his narrow (and narrow-minded) world. The world is bigger than the town of Moline, he knows, but he is already resigned to knowing the wider world only through books. We taste the leading edge of David’s bitterness because, unlike him, we know he is fit for greater things.

Those greater things begin to reveal themselves to David in the person of Callan, the new healer from far-away Florida. Callan’s sophistication and kindness go a long way to waking up David’s dormant senses of self and wonder and possibility. The erotic feelings David develops for his new friend confuse him, but he suffers no tedious bouts of self-hatred; his self-acceptance is not easy, but it is interesting. David is upright and stalwart and honest, all good qualities in a chivalric hero, but he’s no simp, and he’s not perfect. When the first of many crises strike, David makes a youthful, foolhardy error in judgment whose serious consequences set the larger plot in motion.

With great depth of feeling, and without undue sentiment, David’s affair with Callan progresses as the larger plot evolves in ever-widening circles, each more sinister than the last. A happy ending is no foregone conclusion, and, at the risk of spoiling things, it doesn’t happen. But what does happen is tremendously rich and satisfying. The protagonists aren’t destroyed, nor must they resign themselves to a life of discreet conformity. In fact, the society that sought to destroy them is itself shaken to the point of destruction. In return for David’s and Callan’s roles in preserving something of the world that would happily have eliminated them, and in recognition that they now have devastating knowledge of the power and intentions of the government, David and Callan are able determine the course of their own lives, an outcome impossible to imagine at the beginning of the novel.

Solidly fantastic and classically romantic and unabashedly gay, A Strong and Sudden Thaw transcends genre and niche so spectacularly that it is hard to imagine any reader not being ill-served by missing it.

Review by Lee Benoit.

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