Sweet Hearts: A Novel

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

At sixteen, Flint Zimmer has already spent eight years in juvenile detention. Now he has escaped, and he is going 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. But is Cecile Flint’s hostage or his accomplice? And 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, violence, love, and the possibility of atonement.