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I watched the entire televised Waco siege of David Koresh (Lamb) and the Branch Davidians tragedy as it unfolded in March-April 1993. I was pregnant with my daughter, on temporary bedrest. Our technology was limited yet we thought it was vast. So what did I do? I read books and watched TV, and the Waco siege was the most compelling TV at the time. I was facing potential loss while loss was unfolding on our TV screens. Waco is 100 miles north of Austin, my home, a plain small city with not a whole heckuva lot going for it. Then Waco broke national and international news. That was huge then, in the 1990s, when not even Austin was on the "destination" map. Texas writer Bret Anthony Johnston says that this is not the life of David Koresh. Which, I'm going to interpret as--rather, this is the life of fictional characters, Roy and Jaye, and their friends and family. Or consider it as a re-imagining of David Koresh’s clone. I have read some of the non-fiction material on the whole damned catastrophe, and nobody has hit the right notes of truth more than this author.

It isn’t just facts that tell a story about an event. It’s emotional and psychological truth that matters, and that’s where it counts for me. The main characters are Jaye, a fourteen-year-old girl and beaux Roy, also fourteen. Roy and Jaye tell their love story in alternating narratives, certainly borne from Johnston’s imagination, but the setting/melding of the calamity in Waco is brilliant. Johnston’s muscular use of language is sizzling, simmering. He uses robust and ripe words and phrases, very physical and forceful and yet sinewy and lucid. No word is superfluous; every sentence is nimble and supple---all five senses engaged, and a memorable romance. It's a page-turner, dear readers!

A lot is said about the stars, in metaphor, personification, and just the boundless entirety of its space. This all happened before cell phones kept us connected without interruption, when we had to depend on being there in the room where the telephone rang. There was a lot more waiting, suspense, expectancy, or not knowing that went along with this era right before the explosion of iPhones. Time and space have been reclassified by mobile phones, and some of the magic and anxiety of being able to contact your most important person was wholly different then.

“…I imagined a universe where a person could rearrange the stars to relay a message to someone else, a night sky inscribed in cryptic code, an illuminated language of loss.� How much would you sacrifice for a faith or glory, the abstractness of a supreme being? What would you do to save the person you most care about---and what is the meaning of “saved� to these characters? Is it religious, spiritual, emotional, or literal? Would you save your one true love first, or would you save what a charismatic leader calls your “soul.�

David Koresh (OK, Perry Cullen in the novel), to some folks, was like Jesus, a prophet of the Seven Seals, a person who could probably quote the entire Bible. To his worshippers, he is inviolable, unassailable. He was also a pedophile, and essentially had babies with babies. But he twisted these people’s minds enough that they believed he was their savior, and everything he did was part of his God-given right.

The story progresses with a pacey rhythm and I was on edge the whole time. Does this novel have more impact if you are familiar with the Waco standoff and siege? I do think my knowledge of the event and the minutiae of its moving parts created a particularly ripe suspense for me. However, it is Johnston that held all these facts together and wrote a compelling love story that is superimposed and braided into the dark events of the time. Those of us that followed the story in 1993 will have that whole scenario playing in our heads while we read WE BURNED DAYLIGHT.

I also kept thinking of the Supertramp song, “If Everyone was Listening." At one point, I put it on to connect to the most moving lyrics. It’s from the album, Crime of the Century—“For we dreamed a lot, and we schemed a lot, and we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.� It was like a play, Koresh as the mad clown, the compound his stage. “You don’t know what you’ve done, the finale’s begun.�

The friendship/romance between Jaye and Roy was deeply emotional but held with subtle restraint. They must have been the two most intelligent, quick-witted people in Waco, their feelings for each other illuminated their vulnerability and their strength. Could it survive—one love on the inside, one on the outside? While Perry Cullen kept his flock close at hand—everyone on the commune had a job to do, there was no plumbing, and there were hard chores to be done—the drama of Jaye and Roy played out.

Jaye's mother hauled her to Texas from California to be with Perry Cullen and his nutty flock. Jaye endured, she loved her mother, but she also kept a cautious distance to Perry, at the very least spelling out her boundaries to him, with a cutting tone, if that’s what it took. She knew he tried to groom her, and all the young ones. She was only fourteen, an attractive age for Perry. Yeah, he's that.

Jaye did things like sneak in Cullen’s room when he was gone to use the only telephone in the compound, to call Roy, and to do a bit of sabotage, like pour out Perry’s milk and put the empty carton back in the fridge, or eat his cheese. Lots of people went hungry, there wasn’t sufficient food, but not Perry. He had everything he wanted and more.

The story is propulsive, irresistible. It engulfs me. You may break dates, disregard dinner, ignore everything else but the book. It’s so gripping, meaningful, and expressive that you’ll obliterate any obstruction between you and WE BURNED DAYLIGHT. It’s page-turning and maximum appeal, natural sounding, effortless, but you know he worked hard on it with dedication and no fakery. Johnston is a breath of fresh air, a fearsome writer and master storyteller, with tantalizing wordplay.

Thank you to Random House for sending me an ARC to read and review. It’s a hard act to follow. I’ve been a fan of Johnston since REMEMBER ME LIKE THIS, another ripped-from-the-headlines event written for specific and individual fictional characters. Johnston does that so well. Took a huge national tragedy and yet owns it for his indelible make-believe one. The song remains the same.