Day of the Dragonfly is an epic story of the struggle against poverty. Beginning in rural Brazil during the Great Depression, this Odyssey ends in 1979 on a broken-down chaise longue in front of a trailer in Miami. The novel's protagonists include a twelve-year-old girl seeking safety, a fourteen-year-old boy searching for land free from drought, and a young woman destroyed and exiled within a cult.

     The way in which poverty clutches onto its victims is made apparent. It isn’t possible, even once, to throw money at a problem, and without that tool the true difficulty of poverty becomes clear. At its most heroic, Dragonfly challenges conventional morals, and in the end, the reader is shown something of the importance of a life little noted.

Most of Dr Vogel’s writing has been educational, and almost all of it (including an introductory physics textbook) has been humorous. (His research papers on neural network models of higher cognitive processes are not at all amusing, but at least he almost failed his thesis defense when the conservative academic from a country with a certain national stereotype took issue with his amusing style - not appropriate in scientific writing).

Facing retirement, Dr Vogel has taken the opportunity to begin writing fiction. (Well, the physics problems about his Chrysler powered Smart Car were already fiction.) Day of the Dragonfly is the first novel he has let out of his hands, and it is the first that is not humorous. “It was an unexpected book that came chasing after me while I was sitting with my wife on a long, hot, tropical day in Brazil. It didn't have a single joke in it, but it insisted on being written. It seemed to write itself. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stop writing itself, and when it went past three hundred thousand words, it had to be hacked back like an acre of kudzu.”