A reader might expect to have a steady grasp on Hewitt’s narrative before it can even begin; however, the novel reaches beyond assumption in its ingenuity. Hewitt doesn’t make an attempt at overturning the trope, but rather tactfully distills it ... The closeness shared between James and Luke is heartwarming to read, feeling specific and universal at once. Hewitt’s language is lush and beaming. The world he creates in his storytelling is well-realized ... The rapid turning of the seasons keeps the reader in suspense, waiting to see, desperately, whether or not this soil will allow for blooming.
Clings insistently to the superficial ... Hewitt has a fondness for lyrical description, particularly of the natural world ... These passages effectively stir up an aura of misty poignancy, but they are deployed with such frequency and at such cloying length that at times it seems like Hewitt’s goal is merely to conjure an exquisite atmosphere, rather than to understand these characters or to imbue their story with any emotional weight ... While the novel is full of beautiful surfaces, it never gives these boys any sense of particularity; we don’t know what draws them to each other. This is the problem with unrelenting rapture: It can become generic and impersonal, even solipsistic ... This is sentimental without communicating actual sentiment, airy without ever taking flight.
Illuminates the complexity of gay adolescence with exceptional insight and graceful prose ... With its masterful interiority, Hewitt’s novel will be a must-read for fans of Édouard Louis, Douglas Stuart, and Brandon Taylor.
A tender, skilled and epiphanic work ... The novel’s chief propulsion derives from observing James’s developing consciousness. We are wiser than he is, or certainly ought to be, and this ironic distance compels the worried reader on ... In both his poetry and prose, Hewitt seems to me to be working, with immense fidelity and skill, towards a singular vision, in which profound sincerity of feeling–and the treatment of sexual desire as something close to sacred–is matched with an almost reckless beauty of expression. What is that, if not bravery?
Tender ... Whether describing teenage emotions or the countryside across the seasons, Hewitt (All Down Darkness Wide) impresses with his lyrical prose ... Raw and coy ... Touching ... It somewhat strains credulity that, two decades later, James still fixates on a would-be teen romance ... This elegiac novel, ideal for readers of Andrés N. Ordorica's How We Named the Stars, posits that first love—even if unrequited—persists.
A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity ... Wordsworth meets Justin Torres in its aching intensity and passionate descriptions ... Readers looking for gorgeous language and richly developed atmosphere will be impressed and moved.
Hewitt manages to convey both the allure and the peril of that spark ... Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner.
