The story jumps back and forth over the life of the protagonist, Mathew Harrison. He is born in 2014, the year that dust storms sweep across the Gulf South, rendering it a desert wasteland, cut off from the "saved world" in Birmingham and beyond. He faces a crisis during his 30th year when his conceptions of loyalty and hope are both quickly unraveling.

Nicknamed "daydreamer", the protagonist has evocative visions of the past. They once gave him a taste of freedom and beauty, but become more and more a source of distraction and torment. Similarly the reader is bounced from scene to scene and can easily become disoriented as Braziel toils to explicate Harrison's personal mythology without indulging in much plot development.

The reader is rewarded, ultimately, for working through the first half of the book as he or she can better get into Harrison's mind and appreciate his crisis -- one which remains mysterious even to his friends and family. Having reached that foothold, however, it is unfortunate that Braziel withholds any kind of real payoff as the ending is inconclusive. Appropriate, perhaps, but unsatisfying. ( )