Contrary to the title, there is very little sweetness in Sweet Hearts; every character in this book has a personal tragedy. As the narrator, Marie Zimmer, tells us, "There's no safe place in this story."

Sweet Hearts encompasses several generations of family history in compact prose. Thon mercifully provides a map of Montana and a family tree to help the reader keep track of the cast of characters. The characters' speech is also compact, demonstrating the strained communication among this family.

For the first fifty pages or so, my heart broke about once per page. An image, a turn of phrase, a single word would capture the bleakness inherent in these character's lives. I think that was necessary to open the reader up to the story, to prepare for what's to come.

This is a demanding novel in a number of ways. Most of all, the ending asks the reader to forgive the unforgivable. You can't just read this book as an intellectual exercise--you need to let it take you where it goes, to find compassion for all the characters. It is by no means easy or light reading, but I found it entirely rewarding. This book is worth all the effort.

"Sweet Hearts" wowed me from the first pages--I loved the tension of the voices here, the mystery of the past, the delicate, deaf narrator who is yet deft and powerful and gorgeous in her understanding of her damaged people. I've never felt so connected to such hurt and harm--Thon has a way of making every human corner so accessible and understandable, all while making poetry of these lives. The book builds and builds and grows in subtle layers--lovely stuff, an experience more than a read. "Sweet Hearts" leads me back to my old favorite Thon books--she's a master of the short story, too. I've got to stop now, go back to the book--it's one of those you read and finish and just turn back to page one to experience again. Melanie Rae Thon is a national treasure. I want to give this one six stars.

For those who have never encountered the work of Melanie Rae Thon, this book serves as a powerful introduction. Thon's characters are memorable, palpable reminders of our own difficult journeys through family and history. Marie, a deaf woman, retells the story of her sister's children against the backdrop of their own submerged family history. But Thon's storytelling isn't merely a fascinating tale of children turned criminal and abandoned by family and society; Thon's writing is marked by lyricism and grace. She brings us Flint and Cecile, children we have seen echoes of in our contemporary world--the ones we hear about before clicking off the television at night--and we see the family that shaped them, the family that refuses to accept responsibility for them. Marie is the novel's quiet conscience, assessing her own role in the children's crimes. The result: we, as readers, question our own culpability and our own capacity for compassion. Thon's characters jar us out of our own passivity, and readers emerge from the novel with a new sense of self. It is a stunning, remarkable book, and Thon is unlike any other living writer today.

The majority of stories that make up this collection by one of Granta Magazine's "Top 20 American Novelists Under 40" are weak and more than a little doe-eyed in comparison to the gritty, moving tale that appeared in the Granta issue. The tales that do work best all seem to feature a recurring figure at their center, the title character of Thon's later novel, Iona Moon. Given the time that a novel's length allows, Thon can transform the quaint into the unrecoverably beautiful, develop a pang into an ache, but most of these pieces don't seem to quite stand by themselves. After all of this less than complimentary talk on my part, let me say that, given the strength of the Granta piece, I definitely plan to check out her soon-to-be-released collection, "First, Body"

Now that I've read Melanie Rae Thon's GIRLS IN THE GRASS, I know what's possible from truly great short stories--and there's no reason to settle for anything less.

I first read one of Thon's stories, "Iona Moon," in a small literary magazine a few years ago. Used to short fiction that lacked engaging plots, complex characters, and that left me ultimately dissatisfied, I was startled by Thon's sustained, narrative energy, bold characters, and lyrical prose. But there was something else that, at the time, I couldn't quite identify--now that I've read her collection, I realize that Thon is a writer with a moral vision out of which she creates characters of great vitality and vulnerability who struggle with questions of faith, guilt, power, desire, redemption, love. For me, this kind of depth and craft makes reading short fiction incredibly rewarding.

A few examples--There are three best girlfriends in Thon's title story, "Girls in the Grass," teasing with the pleasures and confusions of sexual desire and friendship. There's the twelve-year-old girl in the chilling story "Punishment," who is haunted throughout her lifetime by her complicity in the hanging of a slave in 1858 on her family's plantation. There's the young girl in "Repentence," whose resentment of her senile grandmother leads her to discover her own wickedness and desire. There's the aging male professor in "Small Crimes" whose clumsy seduction of a promising, younger woman poet opens up her painful, revealing past.

Each story is in itself fully realized, but each gains meaning and power from its arrangement in the collection.

Beautifully crafted and large in their scope and emotional complexity, Thon's stories offer readers a powerful, transforming experience.

The book had a great storyline, but was too disjointed and jumped around far too much.For me that took a lot away from my enjoyment of the book. Maybe I'm just too picky, but this is my take on it.

I came across this book after reading an excert in another source and knew I wanted to read more of it. Concerned primarily with Iona Moon, a skinny dirt-poor farmer's daughter, and the teens she hangs out with (including boys who would be glad to be with her, if she meets them at the movies, buys her own ticket and leaves alone), this book at times approaches the lyrical in its description of human heartbreak. For a young woman searching for love, there are few good options - mothers in this book are dead - either emotionally or literally, and yet, they are also the healers and the "hopers" who provide the voice and the strength to go on - whether the voice of Iona's own dead mother or Pearl, the mother of her Indian lover who heals her with the taste of bitterness. This book combines the smallness of small towns with their narrow class structures and small minds along with the expanse of nature - rivers that run and skies that extend forever, working as a metaphor for the human heart that can dream large and wide, but must return to the narrow confines of the practical in life - where the cows need milking, the choices are few and the easist way out of town is not the road, but death. "Sorrow came in soft waves. She saw that the smallest sacrifices were the ones that drowned you in the end." Still, the book is as full of hope and heart as it is of heartbreak. Thought out of print, it is worth tracking down and reading.

This book is great, and an awsome read. It has it's funny moments of growing up, and discusses the things that everyone tried to forget when they were little. I was really sorry to finally be on the last page because i felt that i would be perfectly content to read forever the story of iona moon. out of the other books by Thon, i thought this was the best book she has written, and was delivered perfectly to a reader. Don't pass this one by!

I picked this book up while working my way through the Granta list of top writers.

It is well-written and harrowing, but the unrelenting grimness of it all wore on me. I had a hard time finishing the book.

I'd like to see at least a few rays of hope and light.

Bill Chance

First, body is a slim book of ten short stories...each one flowing or shall I say crashing into the next like something untamed, unmanagable.

Thon's writing is atmospheric...bringing the reader into a world of darkness, drugs, sex, and booze. I found my heart quickening, felt a sense of urgency; at times I wanted to quit reading but I could not.

"I know I am strange. I drift. Maybe I'm smoking a cigarette, leaning on the bricks. Somebody's talking. Then I'm not there. I'm a window breaking. I'm peices of myself falling to
the ground." -----Nobody's Daughters------

First, Body takes the reader into places we don't want to go...but we go anyway...It reveals other worlds we don't want to know about...but we listen.

We want to believe we live in a perfect world, but reading this book helps us crack open our little cozy cocoon....and we are forced to fly into the reality of it all.

Thon's prose is more like poetry...Intense and beautiful. I could almost smell the stale cigarettes and whiskey filling my bedroom, hear the sound of ice rolling around in a glass.

But I am still trying to figure out if I liked the stories or not! My suggestion....Read it and form your own opinion...Thon's voice alone is worth the trip to the book store.

I forget to breathe when I read this book. It's not just the voice and the characters--but the language that leaves me breathless. Her stories of homeless teens leave me frightened but I cannot get the scenes she paints out of my mind. Melanie Rae is good--very good--she is as graphic as Robert Morgan--maybe more. The only time I feel I'm reading stories of the same calibre of writing is when I read Annie Proulx. First body is powerful and you should not miss this book if you are a writer.