Hot Season is a thoughtful, beautifully written and highly original examination of a pocket of recent American history that hasn’t been well explored in fiction. Here the romantic ghosts of sixties and seventies environmental radicalism meet the paranoid realities of the post-Patriot Act Bush years. Monkeywrench-style sabotage now falls under the government’s newly broadened definition of “terrorism.” FBI agents openly harass local activists, the environmental college may have been infiltrated by undercover agitators and everybody is more than a little on edge. Like the drought-ravaged forest all around them, it seems the slightest spark may set everything ablaze.
The story revolves around several young women in the fictional northern Arizona town of Crest Top. (Fans of anagrams may find a hidden meaning there.) Katie, Rell and Michelle are at three distinct points on similar journeys. From righteous, youthful idealism and reckless love to the creeping onset of an adult’s weary realism to poignant, bittersweet loss. Their passions and convictions and rich inner lives are thoughtfully examined, giving each the human complexity of all great literary characters. The location is as vividly and lovingly rendered as the characters, setting Hot Season in a very specific time and place that smells like American Spirit and evokes the wide-open skies of the southwestern high country.
Though it contains an honest-to-God, nail-biting, race-against-the-clock climax which would have been a fine finale for a less ambitious novel, Hot Season has more on its mind than thrills. The last sixty pages of the book, as its characters look to the future, are both hopeful and defiant. Susan DeFreitas has a lovely prose voice, and I look forward to hearing it tell many more stories in the future.
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Reviews with images
A book about the poetry and drama of the natural world and human relationships.
In Hot Season, the land itself is arguably the main character. As its layers are revealed, your senses are ensnared and you long to meet this place. As for the human characters, you know what makes them tick because Susan DeFreitas lays their hearts open and makes even the most mundane details of their lives poetic.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2016
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Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2017
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2020
A book about the poetry and drama of the natural world and human relationships.
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2020
In Hot Season, the land itself is arguably the main character. As its layers are revealed, your senses are ensnared and you long to meet this place. As for the human characters, you know what makes them tick because Susan DeFreitas lays their hearts open and makes even the most mundane details of their lives poetic.
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2020
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Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2016
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
What a great book. I really connected with the story
Reviewed in Canada on March 12, 2017