“As we walked home, I knew from far away the trees would’ve looked nice, the grass would’ve looked green, and we would’ve looked like just a couple of boys walking home, armed with Midwest love and Bible Belt morals…. But up close, the trees were scorched, the grass was dead, and the boys were on the verge of tears with the belts of those morals tightened around their necks, threatening to hang them if they dared step off the stool of masculinity”

The Summer That Melted Everything is the first novel by American author, Tiffany McDaniel. Fielding is an old man now, but the summer of 1984 is one he can never forget. It was hot, blisteringly hot, and his father, prosecutor, Autopsy Bliss had published an invitation to the devil: “It got me thinking about all the things we are so certain about. Like the devil. I put that invitation in the newspaper, and I thought the devil will show, and he will have a pitchfork and horns and be red all over. He’ll be mean and cruel and evil…”

When Sal, a thirteen-year-old black boy arrives in Breathed, Ohio, he’s not what anyone imagined the devil would be. Sal is different: he seems to know things he shouldn’t, and has a wisdom beyond his years. Sal’s appearance somehow seems to be a catalyst for major change in the lives of Fielding’s family and their neighbours. Or is it just the inescapable heat? No one in Breathed will ever be the same.

McDaniel prefaces each chapter with a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the beginning of many chapters, the elderly Fielding talks about his present life before returning to the events of that fateful summer. McDaniel’s characters are quirky but appealing (eg Stella Bliss has ombrophobia and lives life indoors, creating countries in the rooms like Will Cardiel’s mother Diane in Michael Christie’s If I Fall, If I Die).

McDaniel gives the reader a plausible plot cloaked in utterly gorgeous evocative prose: “In his earthy voice, his prayers sounded like the haymaking I heard one time when passing a field in harvest. The cling clang of sharpening the scythe’s blade. The sharp scythe swiping and cutting the grass in crunching whooshes. The rake coming softly but scratchy as the cut grass is gathered and rolled into bales. Bales to be kept back and saved in the very seconds that had made them” is one example.

“I knew what he had done was rubbing at him like little grains of sand scraping his bone.... I went up to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, feeling on the edge myself. The sadness like a motor, idling inside me. Idling still. Sometimes vroom vroom. But never off” is another.

McDaniel’s coming-of-age tale features racial prejudice, homophobia, a serial killer, guilt, sadness and mass hysteria. While there is humour, there is also a big dose of heartache, and even the most cynical reader will find their eyes filling and a lump forming in the throat. This is a brilliant debut novel from an author to watch.