This book consists of two novels by David Vardeman written ten years apart. Suddenly, this Summer is a dark mystery; April is the Cruelest Month is a dark farce. The change is not in Vardeman at all. As you read either of the two novels, the Vardeman of the other novel is lurking, and maybe laughing … even scoffing.

Suddenly, this Summer, turns you into an intelligent beetle and sets you free to roam the mind of Roberta Sookey, Iowa librarian, fat woman, woman beset by tragic circumstance, iron lady, proto-feminist, fearless, with the moves of a boxer or ice skater and a mind like a patch of ice she didn't see coming. Your time inside her head will change nothing outside your door.

April is the Cruelest Month may be the cruelest book. But you will laugh at it, and therein is your complicity. Eddie P'Poole strangled his mother and then shot himself, and there you sit reading and laughing. What kind of monster are you?

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