When Angels Rest

Amanda Heller

From log cabin to mobile home is six generations: such is the story of Stay More, an imaginary but probably typical enough town in the Arkansas Ozarks. . . . Harington is a versatile parodist with a zany sense of humor which he aims at anthropology, textbook history, the folk tale, and much else besides. -- The Atlantic Monthly

Kevin Grandfield

A tour-de-force from perhaps AmericaÆs greatest unknown veteran author. Eerily switching tone from Norman Rockwell to Norman Bates, Harrington portrays fictional Stay More, Arkansas, during WWII. Twelve-year-old newspaper publisher Dawny narrates, like his idol war journalist Ernie Pyle, to ôgentle reader.ö DawnyÆs gang and baseball team are the ôAxisö while their rivals are ôAllies.ö Their childhood games grow more sinister as the war creeps in, culminating in a set of war games. The charm returns when the recruits arrive, led by a dapper journalist lieutenant who practices love and war alongside Dawny. But things sour again at the storyÆs chilling conclusion. Harrington has crafted a deft narrator, three-dimensional characters, a charming town and a tight story. His tenth novel should motivate readers to seek his previous nine. -Book Magazine

Peter Straub

Harington is one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America. Everywhere, his work is full of mystery and heartbreak kept afloat by high spirits, sensual pleasure, and intellectual joy. -- The Washington Post

Robert A. McLean

Harington's story-telling unravels in the fashion of a guitar-plucking folksinger's ballad: a soulful tune in a night of katydids and mosquitoes, with a counterpoint of tobacco juice hitting the dry wood of a front porch steps. -- The Boston Globe

Times Times Literary Supp.

Mr. Harington is a master of the supremely difficult art of realistic erotic lyricism, and he sees the wider implications, with a note of comedy always recurring to save the moment and the whole portentousness.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Fans of Harington's (Butterfly Weed) fictional town of Stay More, Ark., will appreciate the latest escapades set in this quirky, backwater locale during WWII, where games of Allies and Axis warfare have replaced cowboys and Indians. In a place that distinguishes between only two social classes, "the poor, and the dirt poor," the town's young people fill their free time with battles, plots and counterplots as they watch Stay More's young men leave town for the real things. Twelve-year-old Dawny, inveterate observer and voyeur, writes up local events in his own weekly newspaper, the Stay Morning Star, while making frequent asides to his audience, "Gentle Reader," and offering amusing observations about the legendary antics of the Dinsmores, Dingletoons, Ingledews and Coes. The author's wit comes to the fore when an army detail lands in Stay More for Pacific theater training and the real war games escalate. Seen through Dawny, this is a poignant coming-of-age tale, not only for him and the town's young people but also for a nation whose innocence is sorely tested by the loss of a president and the harrowing events overseas that bring death close to home. Harington maintains the breezy originality that makes his 10th book a welcome addition to this talented writer's work. (Sept.)

Scott Bradfield

. . .Harington's books are both unclassifiable and a genuine pleasure to read. There aren't enough writers like him. . . .Those seeking an introduction to Harington's excellent fiction would be better off with. . .The Cockroaches of Stay More. No matter how much we want this latest installment to work, in the end it simply doesn't. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The newest installment in Harington's ongoing chronicle of the Arkansas Ozark community of Stay More (The Choiring of the Trees). This is a world that Mark Twain, or perhaps Booth Tarkington, would have recognized: an insular and embracing small town, despite the conflicts that define it at the time this novel's events occur. World War II is underway, and as Harington's preadolescent narrator 'Dawny' (who, not quite believably, produces his own version of a daily newspaper) reports, the younger 'Stay Morons' have divided themselves up into gangs labeled Allies, Axis, and Japs ('all for the sake of contests, baseball, war games, the play by which we find ourselves in the process of finding each other'). A lot happens in these alternately relaxed and overheated pages: the youngsters' (all too representative) efforts to organize a town government and elect a 'mare' (mayor) fall apart under their inability to bury their differences; local fathers and sons go off to war never to return home; a harmless mule is beaten to death, and a disrespected schoolteacher shows the stuff she's made of (a very Twain-like episode); and in the novel's culminating series of actions, a group of soldiers preparing for an invasion of Japan is billeted in the nearby hill country, Dawny finds and loses his first love, and a shocking act of violence shakes the sleepy Stay Morons painfully awake. Some of this is charming (Harington is at his best when contriving tall tales about mosquitoes who 'outwit' those newfangled inventions called window screens); unfortunately, much more of it feels forced and miscalculated (Dawny is a little too bright and perceptive to be believed; and the melodramaticmomentum of the closing pages undoes the careful pacing that produces many of Harington's best effects, and furthermore seems to have come out of another novel entirely). Stay More remains an intermittently pleasant place to visit, but it never seems fully real, and you can't imagine yourself, or anyone else, actually living there.