Will Weaver's country is the upper Midwest, the heartland. It's his home and his material; he occupies the terrain in his fiction as naturally as he does in life. Here is Weaver on a prairie thunderstorm witnessed by the protagonist of his adult novel, Red Earth, White Earth: "Outside [Guy] stood among the flax and watched the oncoming weather. Now waist-high and blooming blue on the higher swells of the field, the flax's uncertain colors matched the sky. Southwest were the high, shining cumulus cloud towers.... From the Northwest came the lower, darker, faster-moving clouds of the cold front. Guy for a half-hour watched the two fronts collide. Their clouds in slow motion churned and tumbled and rolled upward dark and bulbous. Supported now by yellow spider legs of lightning, the two fronts were no longer clouds but great spiders struggling for control of the reservation sky."

It...