On one seemingly calm summer night in 1985, a group of teenagers go together to a spot that only they know and start to drink. They drink copious amounts of alcohol, have fun with each other, and behave as teenagers normally do.
But things change when one of the teenagers gets into a car and drives away from the meetup. As quickly as the party turned fun, it turned tragic. The lives of everyone in the group, as well as everyone on Division Street changes. After the crash, a young doctor named Ben Wilf arrives on the scene so that he can try and help. His help, however, is not needed as the teen has died. And Ben's life is shattered as well.
Eventually, the accident becomes a secret that the Wilf family (and the other families involved) will never speak about again. If they bring it up, the Wilf family fears, their life will again be irreparably harmed. But for those not involved in the accident on Division Street, their lives start to move on. A family, the Shenkmans, give birth to a baby boy.
Eventually, their son, named Waldo, grows up, he befriends Dr. Wilf, who is struggling with his wife's illness and declining rapidly. Waldo has the ability to interact with anyone and everyone; he gets to Dr. Wilf to unexpectedly talk about the teen's death all of those years ago, opening up the floodgates of emotion and grief and regret in Dr. Wilf and in the community at large. And finally, people in the community are finally forced to contend with the difficult emotions of the teen's death.
Tonally, Signal Fires is a dark, emotional, and incredibly difficult novel. Because of its dark subject matter that involves talk of death and grief and regret, Signal Fires is a unique novel. It is about how people deal with, process, and ultimately lock grief and sadness and depression far away in the recesses of their mind. People, as Shapiro often shows in her novel, rarely deal with grief head-on.
Thematically, Signal Fires explores dealing with and processing grief, the power and importance of family, how time interacts with memory, the human soul, the power of friendship and human bonds with strangers, and love. It is an incredibly thematically rich and complex novel which talks about deeply personal and important themes for the author (and for many readers). Although Signal Fires is an important and complex novel, it is also meant to entertain readers with its characters. Shapiro's characters are richly drawn and life-like. They speak and act like real people and deal with complex and difficult emotions in a reasonable way.
