August 1, 2023
A suspenseful debut novel follows two siblings who have raised themselves in the Texas Hill Country. College student Sky Fielder is barely hanging on, with the help of a caseworker a few years older than she is, when she receives news that her older brother, Ben, whom she had been told died many years earlier, may be alive and in a coma in a hospital in Arizona. Sky and Ben had lived on their own for years, without telling the authorities, after their parents died when Sky was 5, until their lives reached a crisis point and they were placed in the foster care system. Author Theall moves between Sky in the present, as she struggles to adjust to this news at the same time that she becomes involved in a new romance, and the lives of Sky and Ben from childhood until now, much of which is told through Ben's journals. Theall knits the strands together deftly, telling the interconnected stories in relaxed, mostly unpretentious prose. The novel's main drawback is that the author piles on so many problems that they overwhelm any sense the reader might have of the characters, who rarely rise above one-dimensionally good or evil, innocent or corrupt. The siblings face drug-addicted parents, oblivious and controlling adoptive parents, a drug overdose, juvenile incarceration, gang membership, teenage pregnancy, murder, and more. In the context of all this damage, Sky's sweet, sappy romance, which develops with virtually no conflict, seems shoehorned in from some other book entirely. Theall has a finely tuned sense of the novel's various settings, including a reservation where one of the characters takes refuge and learns to work with horses, and the individual scenes and chapters are well developed and engaging, but the novel as a whole flounders under the weight of all those social issues. A well-meaning but overly ambitious coming-of-age story.
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