Opening Lines

“After all these years, it was hard to imagine they were still alive. In the cold still hour before dawn, when other people woke to think of unpaid bills, of all their unkindnesses, their keenest embarrassments, Neva lay awake watching different versions of her parents’ lives flicker by like home movies. She imagined amnesia or imprisonment. A new city where they were unknown and their days full—new house, new jobs, new children. Sometimes what flickered by were possibilities too terrible to think of.”

Neva has pawned everything to travel to Central America, searching for her parents, American Indian activists who had vanished ten years ago. Her suspenseful story unfolds against a highly charged political backdrop in Red Weather (University of Arizona Press), the first novel by award-winning poet Janet McAdams. McAdams, the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry at Kenyon, offers more about the historical context for the novel on her Web site, www.janetmcadams.org.

From Red Weather by Janet McAdams © 2012 Janet McAdams. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2345.htm.