February 2018, Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Generation is back—finally. Over the course of a yearlong hiatus, the pop-punk trio has seen their beloved hometown rocked by racist violence and endured months of radio silence from their brilliant yet volatile front man, Max. But guitarist Jason is ready to put all of that behind him when a late-night call from Max reconnects the lifelong friends and reunites the band.
At a party on the eve of the band’s reunion tour, Jason watches in horror as Max is thrown to his death off a balcony. Or so he thinks. In the chaotic hours that follow, two things become clear: the victim on the balcony was an imposter, and—as usual—there are no simple answers when it comes to the real Max. He’s just . . . gone.
Troubled by the emotional storms that drove Max away even before his disappearance, but desperate to bring him home, Jason resolves to find Max himself. In the long winter shadow of Virginia’s Blue Ridge, Jason sets out on a race against time to save his friend. In doing so, he unravels a series of surprising personal truths about the people and places he cares about most.
February 2018, Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Generation is back—finally. Over the course of a yearlong hiatus, the pop-punk trio has seen their beloved hometown rocked by racist violence and endured months of radio silence from their brilliant yet volatile front man, Max. But guitarist Jason is ready to put all of that behind him when a late-night call from Max reconnects the lifelong friends and reunites the band.
At a party on the eve of the band’s reunion tour, Jason watches in horror as Max is thrown to his death off a balcony. Or so he thinks. In the chaotic hours that follow, two things become clear: the victim on the balcony was an imposter, and—as usual—there are no simple answers when it comes to the real Max. He’s just . . . gone.
Troubled by the emotional storms that drove Max away even before his disappearance, but desperate to bring him home, Jason resolves to find Max himself. In the long winter shadow of Virginia’s Blue Ridge, Jason sets out on a race against time to save his friend. In doing so, he unravels a series of surprising personal truths about the people and places he cares about most.
The news was everywhere, inescapable: on every site, every social media outlet, every channel. Worse than that, it was right outside.
Jason was still in bed as he started to scroll through the headlines on his phone, a visitor in his childhood bedroom in an otherwise empty house. A knot of disbelieving dread began to form in his stomach as the words slipped over him, leaving only the images of scowling, screaming faces, illuminated by a sea of flaming torches.
As shadows resolved themselves into the Jefferson statue and the Rotunda, the world he had always known suddenly looked alien in torch-lit miniature. Headline after headline. The news was all the same.
We were there yesterday.
Something in him wanted to cry out, scream at the CNNs and MSNBCs and all the rest. What right did they have—strangers who two days earlier couldn’t have picked out Charlottesville on a map—to grant themselves the authority to tear his home apart, to condemn the entire life of a town as a single moment of violence?
It’s not like this, he thought. It was never like this.
Jason’s phone rang. Seeing the caller ID, he answered quickly, his voice still raspy with sleep as he muttered, “Hello?”
The young woman’s voice on the other end was icy. “Jase, get me the hell out of here.”
“Hold on,” he said, beginning to rise. “I’m on my way.”
Five minutes later he was in the car, quickly closing the six-mile gap between himself and the picture on every front page in the country. He took the long way to Tara’s hotel, avoiding the University and keeping downtown at a safe distance. There was a heavy stillness in the air, an uneasy feeling that called to mind an approaching thunderstorm. He could feel that things were only getting worse. He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know.
Tara was like a caged wildcat, pacing the hotel room as she let him in, cursing and looking like she might send a fist through the television that was blaring minute-by-minute updates. She, too, had been transformed, and it rattled Jason further to see his friend and bandmate swallowed up by the surge of anger that had overtaken his home. “This fucking town,” she kept saying. “Fucking racist assholes. Fuck!”
Jason watched helplessly, wishing he knew what to say, but his own roiling emotions took over and put him on the defensive. The rally was a violation, an assault that left him at a loss for words, and with a sinking feeling that when his anger did find its voice, tears would follow. “It’s not Charlottesville,” he insisted. “They did this. They came from out of town to make a scene. It’s not us.”
Of course she was unsatisfied. “Why here, then? In this fucking racist town that hasn’t once owned up to the fact that it was built by slaves, or shed any light on the literal Goddamn skeletons in its closets.” Without waiting for a reply, she announced, “We’re leaving. Let’s go home. Now.”
But I am home. He couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud, but as he watched Tara pace—swearing all the while—all Jason could think about was home.
He remembered the tug of his mother’s hand leading him across the University of Virginia Grounds on a mild fall day, recalled sometimes running to keep up, sometimes fidgeting in place as he waited for her to pass down to him the name of yet another ancient tree. The tropical-sounding names had stuck with him better than he cared to admit: magnolia and crepe myrtle and ginkgo.
He remembered the first time he gazed up at the statue now at the center of so much controversy. “Who is that?” he had asked, and nodded knowingly as only a small child can when the answer floated down, once again, from his mother.
“Robert E. Lee,” she had said simply, and without explanation. “His horse’s name is Traveller.”
“Traveller,” he’d repeated, eyeing the massive metal beast. To his four-year-old self, the name of a horse in a statue was much more important than the name of its rider, or whether he had ridden in the Civil War, the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression—each of which Jason would come to hear it called over the course of his public-school education.
He remembered the afternoon walk from his elementary school to his mother’s biology lectures, where he would draw her students’ attention as he pored over the sports section of the Daily Progress with an air of importance. He remembered navigating gameday crowds by his father’s side, and once even being hoisted onto his shoulders to witness the exuberant chaos when the football team finally handed Florida State its long overdue welcome-to-the-ACC defeat.
He remembered cool mountain streams and hot, sunny fields; yes ma’am and no sir to strangers with voices like molasses—women in the grocery store who knew his family tree three generations back and sent well-wishes to them all, and men in rickety old pickup trucks who could tell you the weather for the next month better than any TV meteorologist. He remembered balmy Halloween nights for trick-or-treating and gray, fifty-degree Christmases when dreams of snow gave way to the reality of racing onto a soccer field among friends.
He remembered it all, and Tara knew none of it.
“This fucking town,” she repeated. She stopped pacing and eyed Jason with a look of disdain. “How can you even try to defend this place?”
“I’m not defending slavery or anything,” Jason insisted. “The past is. . . .” He trailed off, felt a pang of missing their other bandmate—the friend whose absence had drawn them to Charlottesville—who had been there for all those years when this town was their whole world.
If only Max were there, he’d craft the perfect line about past and present and the challenge of reckoning with history. But all that echoed in Jason’s head was the Faulkner quote even he knew by heart: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Jason is the lead guitarist for The Generation, a punk band with a controversial message, which has been on an abrupt hiatus for a year, ever since their leader and songwriter, Max, suddenly lost his spark and faded away. Now, Max has finally resurfaced and called them all together to restart the music—except Max doesn’t show up. He has completely disappeared, worse than the hiatus—and Jason is going to do anything to find him.
The mystery of Fireflies and Zeroes is truly engaging and well written. Larson has expertly woven a powerful plot in a succinct page count, and while there were not necessarily huge complications at each beat, neither did the story feel convenient: the characters pieced the puzzle together with sharp wits and determination, graduating to a thrilling, satisfying climax.
Regarding characters, they are absolutely loveable. Each is unique, nuanced, and deeply developed, as are the golden platonic relationships between them, and after just a few pages, a true connection is established. Much of this occurs through touching snippets of flashbacks; a bit more polishing and/or trimming could help smooth the flow without spending so much time in the past, but that said, the flashbacks do not greatly bog down the reading experience either.
The entire time, the atmosphere is enticing, driven by excellent description. A tweak in the style, though, could draw in the reader even further. The current style contains a mixture of showing and telling, and while a greater lean into showing would have provided an even more immersive experience, there is enough showing to carry the reader without distancing too much (and much of the telling was executed in a way that at least minimized the distancing).
Excellent for fans of Sue Wallman, Fireflies and Zeroes is an exciting, tight, and emotional mystery, highly recommended and deserving of much praise.