Search results for ""Author Donald Lystra""

Set in 1957 in rural northern Michigan, Season of Water and Ice is the story of a pivotal few months in the life of young teen Danny DeWitt, who lives alone with his father following the sudden departure of his mother. Bookish and relatively friendless, Danny becomes acquainted with Amber, a pregnant teenager abandoned by her boyfriend and rejected by her family. Both outsiders—one because of disposition, the other because of social stigma—Danny and Amber form an unusual, openhearted alliance that helps each deal with their separate challenges. Their friendship is tested when Amber's abusive boyfriend returns and Danny's mother withdraws more permanently from her family, leading eventually to a crisis that threatens Amber and her unborn child, as well as Danny's concept of love and manhood. Danny struggles to understand himself and the confusing and, at times, frightening world in which he lives. His analytically oriented mind attempts to make sense of the rigid stereotypes of the 1950s, revealing startling truths about the abiding issues of love and family and the dangers to which these ideals are continually exposed. Danny straddles the uncertain gap between childhood and adulthood in this novel that is underscored by themes of independence and obligation, love and sexuality, courage and surrender. This realistic work will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.

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Donald Lystra's first novel, Something That Feels Like Truth, was the winner of the 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction. This volume gathers a bracing selection of short stories by Lystra that are cut from the same cloth as his highly acclaimed novel. The stories in Something That Feels Like Truth confound expected plot turns, and Lystra develops his characters patiently and naturally, bringing them into convincing and honest actions. Every plot point in every story here holds an integral part in the imbuing of its beauty and meaning. You can also tell Lystra has read a lot of Hemingway and Chekhov: and that he aspires to be an inheritor of their effectively concise tradition. But there's a touch of Cheever in Lystra's stories as well: what that master storyteller did for the suburbs of New York, Lystra does for the Midwest.

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