Summer in South Carolina is stiflingly hot. Here, the author uses both a metaphor and a simile describing temperature to link the late-summer weather to Lily’s emotional state at the end of the book. Lily describes an August day, noticing how the heat affects her body and her feelings:

The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled. I plucked leaves off the elephant ear plants and fanned my face, sat with my bare feet submerged in the trickling water, felt breezes lift off the river surface and sweep over me, and still everything about me was stunned and stupefied by the heat, everything except my heart. It sat like an ice sculpture in the center of my chest. Nothing could touch it.

The metaphor of August turning into a “griddle” shows how hot Lily feels it is. Instead of being pleasantly warm, to her it feels like the whole month has become a cooking surface. Because it’s too hot to move and the days “sizzle” in the heat, Lily feels “stunned and stupefied”. All of this makes time feel heavy and slow, even though she’s just heard the life-changing news about her mother and the Boatwrights. She also finally has proof that her mother loved her, but also that she briefly abandoned Lily with T. Ray as a baby. All of this is very emotionally confusing news for Lily.

The simile that compares her heart to an “ice sculpture” introduces a sharp contrast to the heat of summer. Although Lily’s physical body feels overwhelmed by heat, her “heart” stays frozen and hard. She feels emotional numbness after learning the truth about her mother because she doesn’t know how to react. No matter how hot it is outside, her heart won’t warm up.