In the sequel to his much heralded The Rain and The Fire and The Will of God, Donald Wetzel continues the story of John, or Jack, and Rodney, two boys whose innocence, honor, and integrity is tested as they search a river for a lost boat and find more than they had bargained for along the way.

"When I went to prison he disowned me. There will always be wars, he said. No there won't, I said. Shit no, I said, are you crazy? That was roughly forty years ago. It was apparent to me then that war must soon become totally unthinkable. It happened even quicker than I'd thought it would. And so now we most of us do the best we can never to think of it, even though, as I write, about one-fourth of the world's best technological and scientific minds are employed full time in preparing for this unthinkable war. . . ."

According to Jack Haywood, the trouble with the Hill—the farm—is that nothing ever happens there. He expects this summer, the summer of his fourteenth year, to be no different. First there is Jenny Holmes, whom he can go to see only on the pretext of seeing her brother, Les, a real pain. Jenny, who lives a mile and a half away by moonlit trail through piney woods and cypress swamp. Then there is the 'gator hole, even further from the Hill, where one can bravely swim in the secret conviction that the 'gator is a myth. There are the great summer thunderstorms, but they are to be expected. And then there is Rodney, also fourteen, down from White Plains, New York—his mother recently deceased—come to spend the summer on the Hill. But even if Jack never says so, at the summer's end, he'll know that much indeed has happened this summer on the Hill, much that is tender and warm—and quite real—in this story that is not so much of adolescence as it is...