The Lightning People Play

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Cameron Trepp

Kirby Renton is fourteen years old and carrying a weight that no fourteen-year-old should have to carry alone. His dads' marriage is fracturing quietly around him. His younger brother Baxter has epilepsy, and the seizures are getting stranger, visited now by lightning people who descend from the sky and leave behind three symbols that nobody can quite explain. And the seizure-alert dog the neurologist recommends costs more than his family can afford. So Kirby does the only thing that makes sense to him: he decides to put on a play.

Tim Cummings knows exactly what he is doing with that premise. The play-within-the-story is not just a fundraising mechanism. It is a portal, literally and metaphorically, and the magic that opens through it gives the book its most breathtaking quality. Cummings moves between the grounded emotional reality of a family under strain and something genuinely otherworldly with a confidence that most writers would not attempt and fewer would pull off. Here it feels completely natural, because the book understands something true about creativity: that art-making, especially collaborative art-making, opens doors that nothing else can.

The theatre kids at the heart of the story are rendered with the kind of specificity and love that can only come from someone who has spent real time in that world. Cummings holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has appeared in over 200 projects across theatre, dance, film, and television, and that background is felt in every scene where the troupe rehearses, argues, laughs, and gradually becomes something more than the sum of its parts.

What makes the book genuinely special is how it honors neurodivergence, brotherhood, and the healing power of art without making any of those themes feel like lessons to be delivered. They are simply present in the story, the way they are present in real life, woven through characters you genuinely care about and cannot stop worrying over.

Gayle Brandeis called it sheer magic and said it will change lives. That is not an overstatement. This is exactly the kind of book a young person needs to find at exactly the right moment.

About the Author

Tim Cummings

Tim's debut novel, Alice the Cat (Fitzroy Books) was chosen as an American Book Awards 'Best Book' Finalist for 2023, received a Bronze Medal in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards, and is a Finalist in both the 2024 National Indies Excellence Awards for Teen Fiction and the Independent Author Network's Book of the Year Awards.

He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and a BFA from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. He has appeared in 200+ projects across theatre, film, television, voice-over, and new media. 

Recent publications include F(r)iction, Scare Street, Lunch Ticket, MeowMeow PowPow, From Whispers to Roars, Drunk Monkeys, Hare's Paw, Lit Angels, The Wax Paper, Excerpt, and Critical Read/RAFT, for which he won the ‘Origins’ contest for his essay, "You Have Changed Me Forever."

​Tim is an octopus and spider enthusiast. He goes wild for anything with eight legs. He recently discovered he is a masterful hula hooper and can whirl nonstop for eons. He possesses enviable collections of stickers, labradorite, night-sky projector lights, vintage vinyl, and rare first-edition hardcover copies of some of his favorite novels. No one has ever made a better vat of chili, and his lasagna is infallible. 

​He teaches writing for UCLA Extension Writers' Program, The Townies Inc in Ojai, runs private workshops, and coaches authors. He is repped by Inkwell Management in NYC and Connor Ankrum in LA.