The Fall of Alice K.

Seventeen-year-old Alice Marie Krayenbraak is beautiful, witty, a star student, and a gifted athlete. On the surface, she has it all. But in Alice’s hometown of Dutch Center, Iowa, nothing is as it seems. Behind the facade of order and tidiness, the family farm is failing. Alice’s mother is behaving strangely amid apocalyptic fears of Y2K. And her parents have announced their plans to send her special-needs sister Aldah away. On top of it all, the uniformly Dutch Calvinist town has been rattled by an influx of foreign farm workers.

It’s the fall of senior year, and Alice now finds herself at odds with both family and cultural norms when she befriends and soon falls in love with Nickson Vang, the son of Hmong immigrants. Caught in a period of personal and community transformation, Alice and Nickson must navigate their way through vastly different traditions while fighting to create new ones of their own. Funny and provocative, amusing and unsettling, The Fall of ’99 marks a watershed moment in the publishing career of author, Jim Heynen.

A widely published author, Jim Heynen is perhaps best known for his collections of short prose featuring young farm boys: The One Room Schoolhouse (Knopf, 1993; Vintage, 1994), The Boys’ House (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001), You Know What is Right (North Point Press, 1985), and The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap (Graywolf, 1979). His most recent collection of poems is titled Standing Naked: New and Selected Poems (Confluence Press, 2001). He has written two young adult novels, Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice (Henry Holt, 2000; Harper-Collins, 2001) as well as Being Youngest (Henry Holt, 1997), and one major book of nonfiction, One Hundred Over 100 (Fulcrum, 1990), which featured one hundred American centenarians. He has frequently been featured on National Public Radio reading his own stories and has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both poetry and fiction. Jim Heynen lives in St. Paul with his wife Sally Williams, a former books editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.