Lark And Termite alternates between July 26th, 1950, the day of Termite's birth and his father's death, and July 26th, 1959, the day of Termite's ninth birthday: one world of secrets answering another. The book begins with the third person POV of Cpl. Robert Leavitt, an American soldier who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War. The novel then shifts to the same July day nine years later, in the small West Virginia river town where Termite and his half sister Lark, who is seventeen, live with their Aunt Noreen. Noreen, or Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, is raising the children of her younger sister, Lola, whose story she keeps hidden. Lark has been living with Nonie since the age of three, and Termite arrived five years later, when he was about a year old (“he couldn't sit up by himself but Nonie had him a baby bed and clothes and a high chair with cushions and straps, and she had papers that were signed”). Lark has no memory of her mother and has been told only some early family history. She doesn't know her own father's identity, though she does know that Termite's father was married to Lola for just a year before he died in the first months of the Korean War (“They never even got his body back and they had to have the service around a flag that was folded up . . . Nonie says it was wrong and it will never be right”). Lark And Termite deals with the atrocity of war and its echoing ramifications, with a sibling bond whose strengths are both obvious and mysterious, and with perception itself as reflected in Termite's intricate, shuttered consciousness. Adjacently dimensional patterns of time shift and layer as the novel unfolds. Lark And Termite echoes the concerns of Machine Dreams, which deals with a sibling bond against the backdrop of a burgeoning war that would change America, of Shelter, which deals with the perceptions of children against an intricately patterned world scrambled by adults, and of MotherKind, which describes generational bonds and adjacently dimensional patterns of time. Though Americans had no way of “reading” events in the context of the 50's, the Korean War was in many ways a precursor to Vietnam. In Lark And Termite, a cataclysmic event early in the Korean conflict is made very real to the reader, and the cyclical nature of its aftermath continues to influence and echo the present in ways made increasingly known to the characters.