Shane Jones' Light Boxes is a short but powerful novel, one that appears at first to be "experimental" in nature, but which is in fact a mash-up of several ancient forms, masterfully combined here into a new whole. Throughout the novel are elements of the fable and the fairy tale, of the historical romance, of the satire and the detective story. Holding together this pastiche of styles is Jones' rock-solid prose, which is itself complemented by Adam Robinson's extraordinary book design, which utilizes no less than six font faces, multiple sizes of text, and creative arrangements of the text itself.

The book begins at the start of February and ends at the month's end, several years later. February is a month, a season, an enemy combatant, as well as the name of at least two characters in the novel who oppose and reflect protagonist Thaddeus Lowe, a balloonist whose family is at the center of the resistance against the endless winter and the flightless days it brings. After February brings his endless winter, he pronounces that "all things possessing the ability to fly had been destroyed... that no one living in the town should speak of flight ever again." But Thaddeus and his family do not give in so easily, fighting back first symbolically, and then, later with stronger actions:

Thaddeus, Bianca and Selah painted balloons everywhere they could. They pulled up floorboards and painted rows of balloons onto the dusty oak. Bianca drew tiny balloons on the bottom of tea cups. Behind the bathroom mirror, under the kitchen table, and on the inside cabinet doors, balloons appeared. And then Selah painted an intricate intertwining of kits on Bianca's hands and wrists, the tails extending up her forearms and around her shoulders.

How long will February last, Bianca asked, stretching her hands out to her mother who was blowing on her arms.

I really have no idea, said Thaddeus, who watched the snow fall outside the kitchen window.

In the distance, the snow formed into mountains on top of mountains.

Finished, her mother said. You will have to wear long sleeves from now on. But you'll never forget flight. You can wear beautiful dresses--that's what you can wear.

Bianca studied her arms. The kites were yellow with black tails. The color melted into her skin. A breeze blew over the fresh ink and through her hair.

In similarly short sections, Jones relays the story of Thaddeus, his family, the townspeople, even February himself, weaving their narratives together using any number of voices and styles. Strangeness abounds: A group of former balloonists wearing bird masks seeks Thaddeus' leadership, first as a group called The Solution, and then later, The War Effort, seeking in both incarnations to avenge the loss of their children and to bring about the end of winter, as if the two problems are one and the same (and raising questions as to whether or not they are). A mysterious "girl who smelled of honey and smoke" appears as both February's consort and captive, her role in the town's predicament unclear to Thaddeus until very late, despite several interactions between the two of them. Impressively, the narrative never gets lots among all the weirdness, even as Thaddeus' (and the reader's) assumptions get overturned and rewritten and tossed away.

It is impossible to speak of the end of the novel without giving too much away, but the twist at the beginning of the novel's final act is stunningly executed, with some of the book's best writing, and the pages that follow are some of the clearest, most heartfelt writing in the book even as the complexity of the plot itself doubles. Thaddeus's struggle to navigate the many losses of this long winter is a compelling enough story on its own, but becomes even more powerful when added to the communal struggle of his town and the narratorial complexity through which Jones' seems to be commenting on the nature of storytelling, or, at least, the nature of telling this story from within its own pages.

Light Boxes is an impressive debut, and a beautifully designed work of book art. It's short enough to read in a few hours, but complex and mysterious enough to warrant multiple readings, offering new wonders on each subsequent trip to Thaddeus' world, to the long month of February that afflicts it. There's great heart infusing these pages, and it is a victory to read them, to journey alongside Thaddeus from endless winter to summer, from landlocked sadness to the rediscovered joy of limitless flight. Highly recommended.