Light Boxes

April 12, 2010
Jones’s brief and bewildering war fable pursues the plight of a town battling to free itself from the brutal hold of the month of February (also sometimes a person or a force or merely a metaphor), a meanie that has not allowed its wintry grip to lift for hundreds of days. When the despairing townspeople, led by valiant Thaddeus Lowe and his wife and daughter, suffer reprisals from February and “the priests” for trying to break the weather, a group of former balloonists don bird masks and, calling themselves the Solution, instigate a rebellion. Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca, is kidnapped, along with other children, leading Thaddeus to plot ways to deceive February: townspeople walk around pretending it’s summer and secure “light boxes” around their heads to simulate the sun. February, meanwhile, may simply be feeling unloved by his wife, “the girl who smells of honey and smoke” and who seems eerily like Bianca. It’s a quaint and bizarre allegory that explores the perils of equivocation, but it’s likely more pleased with its own cleverness than readers will be.

April 15, 2010
Originally issued in a limited edition of fewer than 1,000 copies, this unique novel of seasonal affective disorder come to life is now being published by a major house. In spare prose that could almost be considered poetry, Jones tells the story of a town ravaged by endless winter. Well, nearly endlessits been February for several hundred days straight. But February isnt only a relentless month; its also the malevolent being holding the town under its sway. Wracked by depression and spurred on when children start to go missing, the townsfolk mount a war against February, who also turns out, well, sort of, to be the author of the story, struggling to romance the girl who smells of honey and smoke. Jones imagery and layers of metaphor and metafiction are alternately difficult to penetrate and light as air, like wandering in and out of a fever dream where the moment things come into focus they dissipate again. In that vein, this literary gem of metaphysical malaise has that ideally weird blend of offputting sensualism and heartfelt emotionjust the sort of thing to ensure a dedicated, if limited, following.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)