Review: The Summer That Melted Everything - Tiffany McDaniel

Review: The Summer That Melted Everything - Tiffany McDaniel - July 2016



In the writing world, there are two sorts of books - there is the first category where the books are written to a somewhat formula and the themes are mass-produced and you see them everywhere and if you are like me then you have also read a lot of them and have them sitting on your kindle/bookshelves to read as they are great reads. Then there is the second category which often for me , I find these certain books difficult to read and get into and often they are confusing - they are the books that I like to call Festival books or most people would call them Literary Fiction. I call them Festival books as they remind me of the book versions of the movies that are played at Rialto - you know the Arty , Foreign Language type movies. The Summer That Melted Everything falls into the second category. The year was 1984 and Fielding Bliss was still a boy of about 12-13 years and lived in a smalltown with his dad - Autopsy Bliss who was a Judge , mother - who suffered from a form of agrophobia among other things , his brother Grand - a high schooler.  In 1984, the town was hit with a massive heatstroke , it was the hottest summer ever recorded and also someone else came to visit that town - the Devil. The devil was a little black boy by the name of Sal . Some believed he was a runaway , others believed that he was the devil and this caused mayhem in the smalltown as you can imagine heat+delusions = chaos.  The book what I can gather is told from the point of view of Fielding as he is now an old hermit of a man and he tells the memories of a year that changed his life forever.  The year 1984 featured alot of new things including the introduction a disease which would become more familiar in today's society and unfortunately many people would die from it - AIDS.  The Summer That Melted Everything is a book that will touch every reader in some way and have you believing and thinking about your beliefs on the topics of  Good Vs Evil , God and the Devil ?