Heat and Light

May 23, 2016
For her excellent sixth work of fiction, Haigh (The Condition) returns to the mortally wounded mining town of Bakerton, Pa., peopled by unsettled folks whose ennui seems genetic, even in the wake of what might be a renaissance as the town begins exploiting a massive deposit of natural gas. Prison guard Rich Devlin signs over the mineral rights to his Pap's farm, hoping for a better life for himself, his wife, Shelby, and their chronically ill daughter, Olivia. Pastor Jess, the widow of Pastor Wes, counsels the hypochondriac Shelby, but begins to unravel herself as she becomes involved with Herc, a member of the Texan drilling crew whom the townspeople resent as noisy outsiders. The Devlins' neighbors, Mack and Rena, are organic dairy farmers whose customers begin to fall away as rumor spreads of contamination from the new drilling. And Gia, the waitress at Rich's dad's bar, has a drug problem that no one but Rich's brother, Darren, a recovering addict himself, can see. The author has deftly, and with few false notes, created a geography of connections among the townspeople, who are brothers, daughters, high school sweethearts, and strangers. Haigh has conjured stories of great consequence out of rural Pennsylvania, observing that "more than most places, Pennsylvania is what lies beneath." She has tapped the deep well of the human condition and relayed something profound about America at the turn of the 21st century.

December 1, 2015

Haigh follows up her New York Times best-selling Faith by returning to Bakerton, the Pennsylvania town that figured in her 2006 PEN New England Award winner, Baker Towers. The town has been fading away, but the discovery that it nestles atop the Marcellus Shale, a huge deposit of natural gas, starts arguments about fracking. With a 150,000-copy first printing, and look for Haigh at ALA Midwinter.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2016
In the same way that characters from Haigh's Baker Towers (2005) dealt with Bakerton nearly becoming a ghost town after the Pennsylvania coal mines were shuttered, the characters here face similarly big changes as fracking comes to the area. Neighbors and friends find themselves at odds as Bakerton farmland is snapped up around them by unscrupulous developers, who sweet-talk their way into the rural area and lay waste to the land. As in the previous novel and the follow-up short story collection, News from Heaven (2013), Haigh shows a nimble hand at writing nuanced, realistically flawed characters. There's Gia, the party-girl barmaid; Shelby, a neurotic young mother who fears the fracking is making her daughter ill; Shelby's husband, Rich, who desperately wants the money the developers promise; Kip, the outspoken, Trump-wannabe CEO of the fracking company; and Mack and Rena, a lesbian couple who find their organic dairy farm's certification at risk from the damage to the land. The novel is not an environmental treatise masked as fiction; rather, it's a perfectly paced rendering of the intertwined characters' personal stories. Haigh smoothly switches between past and present, fully exposing that, indeed, the past is not even past. (Flashbacks set during the Three Mile Island accident are particularly engrossing.) This is a must-read for those who enjoyed the first two titles, though it stands alone perfectlyand is ripe for discussion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)