Sublime

then slowly in the months that followed came his growing realization that the danger was in her mind, and he had to protect her all the more.

He was her secret, her eventual beauty. Through Michael, Melissa finally came to understand what all the fuss was about, the thirst for the stroke, pull, kiss, enter. The way he touched her, his smooth and lengthy hands, the sparks they made within. That look in his eyes, the way he laid them on her. She would lie on her back and let him do everyth

And Lydia herself—the reluctant center of their universe—every day, she held the world together. She absorbed her parents’ dreams, quieting the reluctance that bubbled up within.

He was short and sturdy and as a general thing uninspired, and Mr Coyle, who found no amusement in believing in him, had never thought him less exciting than as he stared now out of a face from which you could no more guess whether he had caught an idea than you could judge of your dinner by looking at a dish-cover. Young Lechmere concealed such ac

Jenny found it difficult to relate to her quiet, poker-faced boy, just as he found it difficult to relate to her. She was embarrassed when he repeated Sunday sermons verbatim or recited the scientific names of plants.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

Or maybe I don’t want anyone to tell me everything will be okay in the language of my childhood because my childhood room is where I learned that nothing in this world would ever be okay.

Like Fowler at the end of The Quiet American, she is looking for someone to whom she can confess her guilt, own her complicity. But when she admits her deed to her father, Juan Pablo, she gets adulation in return. Klay’s prose is stirring and precise:

While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different