Wide Blue Yonder: A Novel
Jun 2010 · Sold by Simon and Schuster
Ebook
368
Pages
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
A National Book Award finalist for her story collection Who Do You Love, Jean Thompson towers into the stratosphere with her new novel, Wide Blue Yonder.
It is the summer of 1999, and something big and bad is coming to Springfield, Illinois, "the place the Weather lived." Wide Blue Yonder is a novel about weather in all its permutations -- climatic, emotional, even metaphysical. Our guides through this summer of blazing heat and fearsome storms compose an unlikely quartet, each preparing in some measure for the end of the world.
Uncle Harvey believes he is the Weather Channel's "Local Forecast." Yet even an arsenal of meteorological facts and figures can't stanch his existential fears. Harvey's niece, Josie, is fixed with a different predicament. She's seventeen, with nowhere to get to in the Land of Lincoln except into deep trouble. Josie's mother, Elaine, feigns cheerful efficiency, desperately masking a far more urgent quest. And then there's the loner Rolando, who hails from Los Angeles. A human storm system fueled by boundless rage, Rolando is on course to make Springfield the ground zero of his wrath.
Newsweek memorably described Thompson's previous collection, Who Do You Love, as "a beautiful book, but a hell of a sad one." Wide Blue Yonder burns brighter, yet moves in the same mysterious ways.
It is the summer of 1999, and something big and bad is coming to Springfield, Illinois, "the place the Weather lived." Wide Blue Yonder is a novel about weather in all its permutations -- climatic, emotional, even metaphysical. Our guides through this summer of blazing heat and fearsome storms compose an unlikely quartet, each preparing in some measure for the end of the world.
Uncle Harvey believes he is the Weather Channel's "Local Forecast." Yet even an arsenal of meteorological facts and figures can't stanch his existential fears. Harvey's niece, Josie, is fixed with a different predicament. She's seventeen, with nowhere to get to in the Land of Lincoln except into deep trouble. Josie's mother, Elaine, feigns cheerful efficiency, desperately masking a far more urgent quest. And then there's the loner Rolando, who hails from Los Angeles. A human storm system fueled by boundless rage, Rolando is on course to make Springfield the ground zero of his wrath.
Newsweek memorably described Thompson's previous collection, Who Do You Love, as "a beautiful book, but a hell of a sad one." Wide Blue Yonder burns brighter, yet moves in the same mysterious ways.
About the author
Jean Thompson is a novelist and short story writer. Her works include the novels A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl, She Poured Out Her Heart, The Humanity Project, The Year We Left Home, City Boy, Wide Blue Yonder, The Woman Driver, and My Wisdom and the short story collections The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told, Do Not Deny Me, Throw Like a Girl, Who Do You Love (a National Book Award finalist), Little Face and Other Stories, and The Gasoline Wars. Thompson’s short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including the New Yorker, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Thompson has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and has taught creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Reed College, Northwestern University, and other colleges and universities. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.
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