Two brothers brave a whirlwind summer in this taut and luminous coming-of-age novel

A twelve-year-old boy lives with his family in a small, poverty-stricken town in Vermont. His father works at a manufacturing plant, his mother is a homemaker, and his fifteen-year-old brother is about to enter high school. His family has gained enough financial stability to move out of the nearby trailer park, and as conflict rages abroad, his father’s job at a weapons manufacturing plant appears safe. But then his mother is diagnosed with cancer, and everything changes.

As the family clings to the traditions of their hard-line Catholicism, he meets Taylor, a perceptive, beguiling girl from the trailer park, a girl who has been forced to grow up too fast. Taylor represents everything his life isn’t, and their fledgling connection develops as his mother’s health deteriorates.

Set over the course of one propulsive summer, Soon the Light Will Be Perfect chronicles the journey of two brothers on the cusp of adulthood, a town battered by poverty and a family at a breaking point. In spare, fiercely honest prose, Dave Patterson captures what it feels like to be gloriously, violently alive at a moment of political, social and familial instability.

Review

"Soon The Light Will Be Perfect is so deeply moving because it is so achingly true. You will not soon forget these people, this place."--Richard Russo

"In Soon the Light Will Be Perfect, Dave Patterson renders a boy's troubled summer in an impoverished rural town with great tenderness and intimacy. Here is a world in which sadness collides with beauty, desire with shame, faith with doubt, and despair with grace. A radiant debut."--Bryn Chancellor, author of Sycamore

"Soon the Light Will Be Perfect is an enthralling debut. A harrowing story made unforgettable by the authenticity and clarity of Patterson's prose, which renders hard truths without apology or false comfort. This novel will leave readers defenseless and I cannot imagine coming away from it unchanged."--Travis Mulhauser, author of Sweetgirl

"Soon the Light Will Be Perfect is a quiet storm. Though set in an America we all recognize and populated with characters we all know, this book is a ticking time bomb that bristles with tension in the most unexpected ways. Like the best of novels, it preoccupies itself with the line between the world as we experience it and what lies just beneath the surface, and Patterson's ability to thread those dichotomies is unparalleled. Even if it feels familiar and comfortable, make no mistake, this is a book of wild discovery."--Jared Yates Sexton, author of The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

"Dave Patterson's Soon the Light Will Be Perfect is a striking debut novel from a writer whose eye for the poignancy of childhood and family is second to none. This foray with a young man on the verge of adolescence showcases the unique pressures of class, illness, and faith in a small-town Vermont rife with broken dreams and missed opportunities. This is a novel that will seize your heart."--Michael Nye, author of All the Castles Burned

"An unsentimental bildungsroman that rides the confluence of boyhood and adulthood, sex and shame, survival and ruin from the opening lines until the very last page, Soon the Light Will Be Perfect does what great fiction is uniquely equipped to do: it makes us brave enough to confront the terror and tragedy we must often navigate to get to the good stuff, and it makes us appreciate the entirety of it."--Xhenet Aliu, author of Brass

"Soon the Light will be Perfect is as unexpected and beautiful as a rainbow over a junkyard. It is a pitch-perfect novel. Cinematic and gritty, rugged and fragile, wickedly wry and heartbreakingly sad. This is a book for sinners and saints alike. A glorious mash-up of The Outsiders, David Sedaris, and Andre Dubus. I devoured this wonderful, wonderful debut novel and have become already impatient to read Patterson's next book."--Nickolas Butler, internationally bestselling author of Shotgun Lovesongs and The Hearts of Men

"The 12-year-old narrator of Patterson's lovely debut paints a poignant picture of his small Vermont town, defeated by poverty...Patterson has captured an ordinary family clinging to traditions despite extraordinary odds in this spare, honest tale."--Library Journal

"With its empathetic characters and often evocative writing...the novel is a reliable source of reading pleasure."--Booklist

"Soon the Light Will Be Perfect is a heartbreaking, gently wrought story about reckonings: with adulthood, faith, love, and death."--Buzzfeed

"A stunning debut." -New York Post

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