In this lyrical, erotically charged novel, Melanie Rae Thon tells the story of Iona Moon - and the young men whose discordant destinies are mysteriously entwined with hers. Mocked and feared by her classmates, Iona is only good enough for Jay when they're in the backseat of Willy's Chevy - anywhere else she's strictly a girl from the Flats, someone who smells of the cows and the fields. She's dirt poor - there is dirt under her fingernails, in her hair, and on her body. It's the kind of dirt that doesn't wash off, that clogs the spirit and the mind: "You could stay in town all night, but the Kila Flats were close as your own breath." Iona's world is one of brutality, a world stripped of affection and comfort, which offers no relief to a young girl who sees and feels too much. Yet she doesn't know that Willy and Jay inhabit a world as cruel as her own - Jay, beautiful and graceful, a brilliant diver destined for college greatness and now gone horribly astray, and Willy, bound by a morality which imprisons and threatens to strangle him. A novel of almost Faulknerian lyricism, Iona Moon is a story about distances: the distance between the potato fans of the Kila Flats and the town of White Falls, the distance between men and women, children and parents, man and God, the living and the dead, and how those distances are bridged by the desire to love. Sensual, haunting, tender, and ultimately inspiring, Iona Moon is a vision of the struggle to live humanely, filled with the voices that constantly pull us forward - and back - into love.
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