THE CIRCLE OF WILLIS

In Hedger’s ambitious debut novel, two damaged people in rural Oklahoma strive to heal.

Readers meet Leotie “Leo” Lightfoot when Ray Shipworth, an EMT, finds her passed out alone in an abandoned “party” warehouse. She was left there by her loser boyfriend, Jake. Ray gets her stabilized and to the hospital. Meanwhile, Ray is planning to propose to his airhead girlfriend, May, when she dumps him. (May and Jake deserve each other; it’s a pity they don’t get together.) Ray joins the Army and spends one tour in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. He comes home almost irreparably shattered with PTSD. Leo is haunted by the fact that she’s never known her mother. When she finds out that she’s grown up being lied to about her mother, she’s devastated and runs off—back with Jake. So it goes with both of them: one step forward and two backward until, through patience and reaching out to others, both to give and receive help, they placate their demons and wind up in a place that any reader could see coming a mile away. And that’s OK; one can still appreciate the complications that arise, though some are a bit silly or contrived, developments that a lazy playwright might fall back on (looking at you, May). Hedger often overheats the prose—when a character takes an honest look at his relationship, she writes, “He examined their tenure together with removed rationale.” Despite this habit, she makes Leo and Ray very sympathetic characters. Hedger’s description of the horrors of the front lines are appropriately terrifying, as is the degradation that Leo suffers under Jake. A nice ironic bit: While Ray is dodging real, deadly, bullets, stoner Jake is playing Call of Duty in a haze of pot smoke. This debut novel has a lot of promising material, patchy though it is.

Readers will be drawn in by the characters’ struggles to save themselves and each other as they fall in love.