Preview of Lightning Bug Summary:

Because Lightning Bug focuses on lost love and the desire to restore that love, Harington uses metaphors of marriage and mating to express the reconciliations of differences. The lightning bug of the titie is Latha Bourne, a beautiful unmarried, thirty-eight-year-old woman who, in July 1939—the time of the novel's plot—is the postmistress of Stay More, and, as the narrator says, "the heroine, the demigoddess, of this world," of, that is, the world of the novel. Like the lightning bug, whose flashes signal a desire for mating, Latha calls forth love.

Latha has two main lovers. One is Every Dill, her childhood sweetheart whom Latha believes she has not seen since eighteen years ago when he raped her and robbed the Stay More bank. The other is the five-year-old Donald or "Dawny," as all the folks in Stay More call him, who is visiting his Aunt...