Sweet Hearts

How hard and how long will we persist in the often hopeless quest to save the ""starved nestlings"" among usDneglected children? In her latest novel, Thon poses this question via the story of two delinquent children on the lam. Just turned 16, Flint Zimmer, who was conceived during, has just been released from a five-year term in a Montana reform school after a history of juvenile offenses, including setting fire to an expensive boat when he was eight and housebreaking when he was 11. On a day that brings ""bad weather and bad luck,"" he hitchhikes across the state to the house where Frances, his mother, lives, hiding there for 11 days in the cold mud under the porch. When he finally slips inside, his heavy-drinking mother allows him to spend only one night. Flint persuades his 10-year-old sister, Cecile, to join him; the two children assault and rob the kindly local pediatrician and hit the road. The frightening yet heartbreaking story of their flight is ""told"" by their mother's unmarried sister, Marie, a ""deaf girl"" who refuses to speak aloud but addresses herself mentally to Frances. Marie's narration is multifaceted, including a history of six generations of ""motherless girls,"" a meditation on the nature of language and memory, an angry dirge for the passing of the Crow language and culture (now a persistent but faint strain in this ""mixed blood"" family) and an expos of prison conditions. Episodic, intensely imagined and darkly portentous, the novel's suspense accrues to the ultraliterary drumbeat of metaphor. Evincing the psychological acuity demonstrated in the author's earlier Iona Moon and the stories of Girls in the Grass, it benefits from Thon's skillful use of nontraditional narrative devices, haunting evocation of Native American history and legend, and mystical vision of the power of forgiveness and love. Agent, Irene Skolnick. Author tour. (Jan. 14) Forecast: Thon was selected one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. The lyrical intensity and intricate play of voices in this novel may make it a word-of-mouth favorite among discriminating readers.