The night before June’s daughter’s wedding, the unimaginable
happens: June is out late walking when an explosion rips through her house, her
life and the lives of others. Killed in
the explosion are June’s daughter Lolly, Lolly’s fiancé, June’s ex-husband and
June’s boyfriend Luke, a man at least twenty-years June’s junior, a man many in
their small town of Wells, Connecticut view with suspicion, Luke returning to
Wells after ten years in prison on drug charges. After the funerals, June gets into her car,
still packed to take the newlyweds to the airport after the wedding and drives
west until she reaches the opposite coast where she stays at a motel, nearly
catatonic, but perhaps healing in her own way.
Told in short vignettes from many points of view, the story
of June, Luke and Lolly slowly unfolds with an easy but generous
narrative. Be certain that every detail,
no matter how irrelevant or insignificant it may seem, has been placed just so
for a purpose. Memoirist Clegg’s lyrical
prose pulls no punches; he doesn’t shy away from the harsh details of life as
he strips away the humanness from humanity, leaving the characters naked with
raw emotion. There are many families in
our lives: the ones into which we are born, the ones we create and the ones
that suck us in unwittingly and unknowingly.
Clegg makes a gorgeous case for families in all shapes in his startling
debut novel.
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