John Dalton's debut novel, Heaven Lake, won the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With his second novel, Dalton proves that the praise was no fluke.
In The Inverted Forest, an assortment of last-minute replacement counselors arrive at Kindermann Forest Camp in rural Missouri, only to learn that the next several weeks will be spent taking care of a special group of campers: 104 severely developmentally disabled adults. Dalton writes with clear-sighted, simple humanity concerning the disabilities of the campers and the varying abilities of the unprepared counselors. Among the counselors is Wyatt Huddy, an often misjudged young man who is disfigured by a genetic disease known as Apert syndrome. The ambiguity of Wyatt’s proper designation--is he more like a camper than a counselor?--is purposeful and is a clever manifestation of one of the novel's central themes.
With a measured sense of dread, the narrative follows Wyatt's path to a fateful interaction that also involves an empathetic camp nurse, a vulnerable camper and a charming but untrustworthy counselor. Wyatt's actions are life-defining for all of those involved and, in the second part of the book, Dalton moves the reader 15 years into the future to explore the consequences of what happened at Kindermann Forest Camp. The Inverted Forest deserves a place on every must-read summer list, and it should be slowly savored until the very end. --Roni K. Devlin, owner of Literary Life Bookstore & More