Daniel Fights a Hurricane is a gentle, quirky and ultimately redeeming book about the nature of our own reality. Shane Jones weaves among three (possibly four) points of view, sometimes with clarity, but mostly with the hazy, almost-remembered feel of a dream state.
Readers get to know Daniel from the inside out, with longer and longer passages about him rather than from him as the book continues. His life is one of increasing separateness from the consensual reality of everyday life, with more and more time spent in his internal world. This internal world, however, is one of beauty and internal consistency, with fully realized people and places that cleverly mimic that of the external world in which his ex-wife, Karen, seems to reside. Her perspective is what gives readers clues about Daniel and his way of seeing the world; she provides a warm, personal love even when Daniel becomes more and more entrenched in his alternative reality.
The hurricane of the title is metaphorical, though at the end of the novel an objectively real storm takes place, joining Daniel's world to Karen's and, we assume, ours as well. Daniel Fights a Hurricane is a joy to read, especially for the little hints strewn along the way as well as Jones's by turns playful and dramatic writing styles. It's a remarkable journey from reality to unreality and back, causing readers to wonder which perspective is more, well, real. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor