FORGIVING AUGUST by Dudley J. Delffs...

FORGIVING AUGUST by Dudley J. Delffs (Pinon Press: $10; 254 pp., paperback original). Delffs’ promising first novel describes a teen-age boy’s coming of age in rural Tennessee: “That summer is forever crystallized in my memory. One moment rock candy, the next a shard of glass.” After graduating from high school, Bounty McGraw chafes at the cloying smallness of his home town. He’s tired of working for his alcoholic father, tired of watching his parents fight, tired of circumscribed horizons. But as Bounty struggles to expand his vision, he discovers secrets darker than any he imagined lurking beneath the town’s placid exterior.