Dangerous debris from the Columbia space-shuttle disaster rains across a swath of east Texas, leaving twisted metal in the streets of small-town Kiser and more horrifying remains caught in the trees of its Piney Woods. Carter Bostic runs the local corner store, keeping a steady trade in small perishables, gasoline, and town gossip. Carter has long felt that she should be somewhere else: somewhere with more than Kiser has to offer. As people move through the town after the explosion, gingerly moving screaming-hot metal and recoiling from body parts, Carter feels like a change is upon her but what? Schwille's new novel focuses on a group of Kiser residents, some who have known each other forever and some who are new to town. Characters' distinct motivations and hardships, and their stories differing narrative styles, ultimately weave a fuller picture. Fans of Thomas Pierce and Amy Hill Hearth will appreciate Schwille's spare, poetic prose and her willingness to examine both the picturesque and the unsavory sides of small-town life. A deeply thought-provoking novel.--Stephanie Copyright 2018 Booklist

A small town's residents cope with their lives and an American tragedy.A scream comes across the sky, and there's nothing to compare to it in Schwille's quietly contemplative and affecting first novel. On Feb. 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded near Cape Canaveral, and debris fell into the water. Schwille imagines that debris fell onto Kiser, a "dinky, third-fiddle" east Texas town near Louisiana. She introduces us to a wide array of locals and their simple lives, now interrupted by search and rescue operations. Schwille's narrative is told from widely different points of view and employs subtle time shifts going back and forth across years. "Time," to quote from her Italo Calvino epigraph, "is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible." Kiser suffers from drought, unemployment, multiple divorces, damaged soldiers returning from war, meth labs, anti-gay sentiments, domestic violence, and racism. Wes MacFarland tells us Kiser "wasn't one of those storybook places." He's a struggling, tormented, gay tree-service foreman married to a woman named Holly. Their young, troubled son, Frankie, "heard the shuttle come apart" and came across an "orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree...an astronaut's torso inside it." Wes will abandon Kiser, moving to Houston to be with his partner, Ben. Holly will divorce him and marry Pastor Will Simpson, who felt she "had brushed against the devil's ways." "Diabetic, Gandhi-thin" Plato Winchester, a "modern-day Davy Crockett," found "bits of metal, pieces of foam, something he said looked like glass." A "shoe-less foot, missing one big toe" is found beside Junior Pierce's mailbox. Gabe Dixon, a poor African-American man, finds a female hand with a ring on it. "The people of Kiser had spread their arms around [this] disaster and accepted the great burden of its grief.""From a wound, beauty rises" in this modern-day Winesburg, Ohio. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.