Soon the Light Will Be Perfect

DEBUT During one eventful summer, as a distant desert war heats up, the 12-year-old narrator of Patterson's lovely debut paints a poignant picture of his small Vermont town, defeated by poverty. His own family is marginally better off than many neighbors because his father has a good job at a military tank assembly factory, but his mother has cancer, and his more daring older brother constantly finds trouble. The family attends the Catholic Church run by a priest with no calling for his responsibilities, even as his hardliner father reads the Bible daily and joins in antiabortion protests. When the father loses his job for reporting defective guns on the tanks, he must go to work at a similar plant in Tennessee. As more bad luck plagues the town, the boy is convinced he's cursed everyone because of his own erotic compulsions. By the close of the summer, his mother improves with new treatment, and their priest returns, no longer a priest but a photographer, ready to take their picture, "the perfect image of a family on a summer's day." VERDICT Patterson has captured an ordinary family clinging to traditions despite extraordinary odds in this spare, honest tale.--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO