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Every Thirteen Years
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
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Publisher: Still Water Books
Pages: 194
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the summer of 1984, the thirteen-year cicadas come up through the clay of East Texas for the first time in a generation - and into Lewellen Creek country arrives a girl named Terry Sanders, a boy named Tim Foster, and the kind of summer that reshapes everything that comes after it.
Mark Branch is seventeen, fishing alone at a pool on Lewellen Creek, when he hears the first one call. It is a single high note, thin and tentative, from somewhere in the sweet gum trees on the far bank. He has read about them - Magicicada, the thirteen-year brood, underground since 1971, coming up by the millions into the pine timber and creek bottoms of Panola County. He knows the biology. He does not yet know what they are trying to tell him.
What follows is a summer that moves the way water moves: unhurried on the surface and fast underneath. Tim, his best friend since fourth grade, falls for Terry the week she arrives in Beulah. Mark falls for her too, quietly, in the way of someone who has learned to keep the important things to himself. By the time the cicadas go silent in late July, something between the three of them has been set in motion that no one will be able to stop - not through the long football autumn of junior year, not through the winter Tim spends lying on frozen gravel fixing his father's truck while his younger brother Luke watches from the doorway, not through the spring when everything Terry has been carrying finally comes to the surface.
Set across two years of a Texas adolescence and told by Mark in the voice of a man still working through what happened, Every Thirteen Years is a novel about boyhood, guilt, faith, and the strange mercy of things that return. It is about what it means to love someone who is not yours to keep, and what it means to lose someone who was. It is about the particular quality of a creek at six in the morning when you are seventeen years old and do not yet know what the summer is going to ask of you.
The epilogue returns to Lewellen Creek in May of 1996, thirteen years on, when the cicadas come back and Mark and Luke come back with them - older, quieter, still learning what Tim left behind.
For readers of A River Runs Through It, The Secret History, and Mariette in Ecstasy.
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