Sweet Hearts

A powerful story of siblings, love, and the legacy of loss.

In this unforgettable novel, Melanie Rae Thon fuses family myth with the cross currents of American history, exposing the violence that shapes individuals across generations.

At sixteen, Flint Zimmer has already spent eight years in juvenile detention. Now he’s escaped and returned home to the one person he loves and trusts: his little sister, Cecile.

Together they rob a local doctor, steal their mother’s car, and flee south toward the Crow Indian Reservation, where their ancestors once lived. Is Cecile Flint’s hostage, or his accomplice? What kind of devotion binds two children to one another when the world has given them almost nothing else?

Only Marie, their deaf aunt, seems to understand the strange logic of their crimes—and the fierce love beneath them. Through a language of signs, memory, and imagination, Marie weaves the Zimmer family’s past into its troubled present, revealing the buried histories that bind the living to the dead.

Haunting and passionate, Sweet Hearts is a searing novel of family, abandonment, and the possibility of atonement.