Set in the middle of our 21st century, "Firewheels of the Forest" is Officini's lyrical dystopian masterpiece following a distraught young woman seeking a missing companion across Dallas and the Sabine Forest of East Texas. His fable uses sly humor, "golden age of Hollywood" references, and the tragic outcome of a disordered society to explore the themes of endurance and conformity, fragility and need, exile and restoration, and most of all moral strength versus moral ambiguity. Characters with a spectrum of different vulnerabilities and different virtues reveal that we all too often face the same difficult choice: utter corruption or heroic virtue. Difficult to put down once the tale starts, the three-day journey traversed in "Firewheels of the Forest" not only has the varying natural brilliance of the muddy banks of the Trinity River to the wildflowers of the piney woods of Texas but, more importantly, raises the question no one wants to honestly answer: have I chosen the better portion?