The Round Prairie Wars

Set on the Nebraska Plains in 1953, "The Round Prairie Wars" is an initiation story told from the viewpoint of Jeb Wilder, a nine-year-old girl whose family lives in a small trailer house and moves every year because of her father's government job. Her mother is schizophrenic, dragging Jeb into a world of shifting realities, vivid hallucinations, poetry, and word games. Her mother's paranoia directly parallels the free-floating hysteria of the Red Scare. Jeb is funny and serious, a liar and a truth-teller, and above all a fighter who must learn how to survive as the perennial outsider. She faces bullies twice her size and adults with half her courage. She and her brother Sam construct their own protective fictions, including the fort they dig to fight dangerous enemies and the magic formula they create to defend their mother from the brutal fate of the mentally ill in the 1950s. Jeb's father fixes what he can, usually a machine; Sam secretly works on pipe bombs under the aegis of Boy Scout merit badges; and her mother progressively loses contact with everyday reality. Meanwhile, Round Prairie inexorably moves toward a horrendous incident disguising small-town bigotry as a purge to keep society safe and protect its treasured ideologies. With the help of a few unlikely friends, Jeb manages to build a life from the rubble with whatever pieces she can find, however broken and random, but uniquely hers.