Arroyo Circle: A Novel

by JoeAnn Hart

ARROYO CIRCLE starts with wildfires, filling Boulder, Colorado with smoke, as Shelley, a white, middle-aged handmaiden to a hoarder is violently confronted by police who believe she put a baby in the trunk of her car. Shelley winds up in the legal system, and in her absence the hoarder’s house and occupants burn to the ground. Unemployable, Shelley rents out her home and is forced to sleep in an unheated garage. Les, an alcoholic, shape-shifting scientist, lives in the creek bed behind her house and helps her navigate this new world, even as Covid sweeps through town. With a strange mix of quantum physics, Buddhism, and Tito’s, Les teaches her about the healing powers of nature and the deeper meanings of home. Into their midst comes a dazed walker who is more closely connected to Shelley than she can imagine. When the warm Chinook winds blow through the mountains and melt the heavy snows, everyone, including the police, has one last shot at redemption.

260 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the story collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the true crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as the novels Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, and Addled, a social satire. Her novel Arroyo Circle is forthcoming from Green Writers Press in October 2024.
Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary publications, including Slate.com, Orion, The Hopper, Prairie Schooner, The Sonora Review, Terrain.org, and many others. Her work most often explores the relationship between humans, their environments, and the other than human world.

Reviews

[Micheline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tory is a good representation of the people living in the Boulder area during two major disasters. The first was the fire created by the drought, beetle kill and the human carelessness accelerated by global warming. The second disaster was heavy rain with major flooding during Covid.
It was a hard read about people loosing everything because of the disasters and Covid.

[Valerie Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book hooked me with characters that rarely get center stage. A mediocre house manager, Shelley, who is likable but incompetent. A mentally ill (or is he?) scientist who has retreated from the world and is now living on the ledge by a creek in Shelley’s backyard. About halfway through the book we are brought into another POV — that of Iris Sokos, a well-meaning local police officer. I found the switch jarring although I appreciated seeing the story from her perspective. This book incorporates climate change, the pandemic and a number of other social ills from homelessness, mental illness, hoarding and our failing health system. The environment was well drawn and believable. I found it difficult to follow Les at times but he grew on me as the story unfolded. His inner monologue was often poetic and perceptive. Not a perfect story but definitely one worth reading.

[Sharon Wishnow · Rating 5 out of 5]

JoeAnn Hart's Arroyo Circle follows the seemingly separate lives of Shelly a middle-aged under employed woman; Les, a homeless alcoholic with mental health struggles; Iris, a police officer dedicated to her sense of right and wrong; and Mandy, a wanderer who does the unthinkable and can never forgive herself. These disconnected characters intersect in Boulder, Colorado a community known for its natural beauty and now a flashpoint for human-induced climate change. The heat, smoke, and destruction of a wildfire sets the story in motion as we experience how the thick air clouds the characters' actions and reactions to their everyday decisions with devastating results.

I found myself worried from the outset about these characters and how their decisions and indecisions would play out. Hart expertly imagines how her characters respond to the world's new threats. No one knows how to survive or rebuild after a fire. Why is one spared when the another loses everything? We have no rule book for violent weather. Hart challenges us to examine greed and over consumerism, mental health, and how easy it is to look away from those most in need right in our backyards.

Hart expertly weaves in humor and moments of hope and compassion as we experience how the world shifts and sighs despite our best intentions to control it. Hart understands that climate isn't the only pressure on society as this story also explores the stress of the pandemic and political change brought forward by the Black Lives Matter movement. It's a lot to pack into one book but it works because it flows organically not forcefully through the story. This contemporary tale at times felt like watching a news documentary, a nature show, and a soap opera. I raced to reach the incredible end where Hart did not disappoint.

With compelling and real characters that felt like people I know, in a place where I could live, Arroyo Circle does what excellent fiction should; it allows the reader to imagine and experience a new world from the safety of the page.

[Gene Helfman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Arroyo Circle, JoeAnn Hart deftly weaves a tale with multiple threads. As the story develops, the different characters become incorporated into the fabric through their disparate involvement in a tragedy. But the final product is less a weaving or tapestry and more a spider’s web. The characters, and the reader, get increasingly drawn in and entangled, moving from the periphery to the center, their involvement at first casual but later inexorably ensnared. The characters are convincingly unique and well-developed, the writing extraordinary, and Hart’s ability to portray chaos and crisis, a skill evident in her earlier books, is exceptional. And of course, as with any of Hart’s novels, apocalyptic moments throw all of the actors together in a climatic whirlwind.

[Bakerpat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would not have picked this book at my library except the local author spoke and did a brief reading so I took a chance and am glad I did.
While the story has some odd components, particularly in the character of Les, the story line is compelling and shows how a few decisions can alter your life too quickly. I particularly was touched by the character of Amanda, an exhausted new mother returning to work, she is stressed and makes a horrible mistake. How many of us made mistakes with our infants in similar situations but someone was looking over our shoulder, poor Amanda did not have that.