Marisa Silver brings a filmmaker’s well-paced plotting and vivid dialogue to her first novel. Set in 1978 and narrated by twelve-year-old Ares, ironically named after The God Of War (Simon & Schuster, $14), this is the story of two unconventional families and assorted strays living on the harsh edge of the California desert; a military testing ground on one side, the austere natural beauty of the Salton sea on the other, it’s a place where “there’s no such thing as careful. There’s luck. Good and bad.” Ares, however, tries hard to be careful. He struggles to protect his autistic younger brother, though he believes he is Malcolm’s greatest danger, sure that he caused his brother’s condition in an accident five years earlier. As Ares yearns for stability and for “possibilities instead of consequences,” Silver deftly dramatizes the confusions and frustrations of adolescence, and tells a riveting tale of lives lived in unforgiving terrain.