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I raced through the novella, appreciated the brevity of the writing and the emotions of the character. But while reading I got a bit restless, from the moment Leo saw Oscar I wanted to know what happened and why.
Over the next 24 hours, Leo wanders around the campsite like a sleepwalker, haunted by guilt and fear.
Ultimately, Heatwave is an intriguing thriller which examines good versus evil and humanity’s underlying barbarism when faced with unfamiliar situations. Given the numerous references to the unusually extreme weather, I think Leonard watching as life is destroyed in front of him without doing anything about it is meant to be a metaphor of how humanity is destroying the planet and we’re all complicit in not doing enough to prevent this, just sitting back and watching, even though it means our own destruction too. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. I have no recollection of how this book came to be on my TBR (shocking, I know), but I do know that I was drawn to the cover, love a good coming of age story and actually read the blurb here that Heatwave was going to be about a 17-year old who while on vacation with his family witnesses another teenager hanging by his neck from the playground swingset and does nothing to intervene. The descriptions of the French campsite setting were fab, I could really picture the scenes perfectly.
Burying Oscar’s body does not make the problem go away, and we follow Leonard around the blisteringly-hot campsite, internally tearing himself to shreds while externally keeping up life as a ‘normal’ teen so as not to arouse suspicion. But as you read on, you get that he doesn’t understand why he did it either, he’s just a young teenager in a place at a certain time that panicked. Originally published in France with the title La Chaleur, Heatwave is Victor Jestin’s debut novel, masterfully translated into English by Sam Taylor, who has also translated Leïla Slimani’s work. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.Translated by Sam Taylor — French author Victor Jestin’s short yet forceful debut novel is part dark coming-of-age novel, part morality tale. Der Autor hat wohl diese Jahre selbst noch sehr gut im Gedächtnis, da es ihm wirklich gut gelungen ist, diesen Charakter zu zeichnen.