Alain Michaud is nineteen years old, and the river stone in his pocket has gone cold.
Colin is gone - not dead, but gone, the way a first love leaves when the world outside the relationship proves harder than either person expected. What remains is a spring semester at the University of Maine, a dorm room that smells of grief, and a question Alain cannot stop asking: who is he when no one is watching?
The answer comes from an unexpected direction. Under the careful tutelage of a woman named Lena, Alain becomes Elijah - a companion for hire in the amber-lit world of men who can afford to purchase presence and cannot afford to admit what they actually need. In hotel suites and Victorian parlors and a stone estate on the cliffs of Bar Harbor, he discovers both the extraordinary reach of his gift and its precise cost.
Then comes summer, and the Valley does what the Valley has always done. The potato fields of Aroostook County. A fry cook's grill. The fluorescent hush of a gas station at three in the morning. The small, irreversible intimacies of caring for those who cannot care for themselves. One layer at a time, the work strips away everything that was laid over the original and returns what was underneath.
And on a Labor Day Sunday, at a white clapboard dance hall across the Canadian border, a man in a charcoal suit with a lowball glass going warm in his hand watches a boy dance - and finally decides to cross the room.
A Valley Burning is the third novel in the Valley Series: a lyrical, unflinching chronicle of queer love, labor, and the slow, patient work of becoming. Written in the tradition of James Baldwin and Edmund White and rooted in the Franco-Acadian landscape of northern Maine, it asks what we owe ourselves after years of becoming what other people need.
The fire has marked him. What it leaves behind is the question this book will not stop asking.
