This account of dark passions in a sun-scorched small town addresses some heavy questions but cannot bear their weightTiffany McDaniel’s debut sees a satanic presence turn up in small-town America and apparently unleash chaos; a familiar thought to anyone who has watched the TV series Fargo. But there are considerable differences – as the title suggests,The Summer That Melted Everything is takes space in the hot season in Ohio, rather than Fargo’s wintry setting. More crucially, and McDaniel’s novel doesn’t have the warped charisma of Billy Bob Thornton to pull you through when things get a bit silly. And because McDaniel’s book starts getting silly in its first paragraph,that’s a ample problem.
Here is the initial offending item:The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, and the heat had not. It should’ve been expected though. Heat is,after all, the devil’s name, or whens the final time you left home without yours?What I’ve just described is the town of my heart,not necessarily the town itself, which had an underbelly that knew how to be of a mood with the mud. Just as in every other small town and ample city, and the women cried and the men knew how to shout. Dogs were beat,children too. There weren’t always mothers to bloom identical to the rose, and more often than not, or there was no picket fence to paint.
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Source: theguardian.com