In a philosophical debut, Tiffany McDaniel holds up a fable for the modern day about the nature of sin and the costs of intolerance.
In 1984, the first Apple computers hit the market and the AIDS crisis looms large over the United States when a scruffy black 13-year-old arrives at the Breathed, Ohio, home of Autopsy Bliss, a prosecuting attorney. The boy in tattered overalls claims to be Satan and asks for ice cream, and a heat wave of outlandish proportions follows. Fielding Bliss doesn't believe a boy his own age like Sal--the Satan/Lucifer conflation he uses as a given name--could really be the devil, yet Sal's world-weary advice does belie his youth. Although the Bliss family--Fielding, his homophobic teen brother Grand, his agoraphobic mother and his gentle father--takes Sal into their home and hearts, they cannot protect him from the trouble that follows wherever he innocently goes, from broken windows to a lost pregnancy. When the heat-maddened townspeople become suspicious of the strange boy, the Blisses attempt to survive the most turbulent summer of their lives.
McDaniel paints rural Breathed as a timeless, Rockwellian small town before demonstrating how quickly the prejudices bubbling below its surface lead its citizens to tear their home to pieces. While often charming, full of summertime nostalgia and folksy imagery, The Summer That Melted Everything swells with the darkness that lurks in the human heart. A promising newcomer, McDaniel will leave readers pondering the nature of good and evil. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads