Shapes the Sunlight Takes

“Nine million different shapes for the sunlight to take. Nine million different ways light slows itself down to experience time.”

Lexie, a 15 year old loner who believes she can see the future.

After an intense visionary experience, Lexie realizes it’s her mission in life to make sure her high school crush gets knocked up. Fortunately, she knows just the man for the job. If her vision is correct, their child will grow up to save the world.

Along the way, Lexie seeks help from the old folks at a high-tech retirement home, a clique of self-proclaimed eco-radicals, and a story her ex-girlfriend once told her about a grotesque tongue who seduces souls at the world’s end.

Shapes the Sunlight Takes is a coming-of-age story, a lyrical work of fantastic fiction about the deals we make with our past and future selves, where the search for perspective among a climate of self-delusion leads to a showdown between freedom and fate inside the surreal landscape of Lexie’s imagination.

“Wagner’s novel does what all good novels should do: it made me think about the way that I think…. an odd, intimate story about the messy and complicated relationship between reality and fantasy.”

– Theo Ellsworth; Capacity, The Understanding Monster

“With an attention to feelings and language that I’m inclined to describe as enviable…. Wagner remembers what it’s like to be a teenage lesbian and does the dirty work of reminding the rest of us.”

– Molly Laich; Missoula Independent