The Sparkling-Eyed Boy

"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life." — Brad Land, author of GoatThe theme of summer love, in Amy Benson's hands, grows up: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy searches out the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire. The achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spend together on the remote shores of the St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are at the complex emotional center of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of teasing, testing local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay: and she was the one he had loved."Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices?" The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, with its heart-stoppingly...