As a teenager in the '60s, Martha Dudman sneaked out of her parents' house to drop acid, smoke pot, hitchhike and otherwise shock her mother, who was devastated when the girl was barred from her own high school graduation ceremony.
Fast-forward 30 years. Dudman's 15-year-old daughter Augusta leaves home for days at a time to drop acid, snort cocaine and hitchhike. She cuts herself and threatens her mother with a knife. Dealing with her daughter, writes Dudman, a former radio executive, is "like sticking my hand in the garbage disposal." Mother and daughter enter a grim subculture of parents who lock their children in restrictive schools or track them down using bounty hunter-like "escorts." Dudman's searing honesty speaks eloquently to our most fragile selves, whether wounded child or frantic parent, in a stunner of a book. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
Bottom Line: Parent, trapped
by Edna Buchanan
"Every day on this job I see new faces," remarks veteran crime reporter Britt Montero. "Many are dead." Her latest acquaintance, though, turns up late in more ways than one: The freshly deceased body of beautiful Kaithlin Jordan washes up onshore in Miami Beach 10 years after she was supposedly murdered. Her husband, a department store heir, is about to be executed for the crime. Fortunately for him, Montero is on the case quicker than you can say Angela Lansbury.
So begins the seventh fast-paced Britt Montero novel by Buchanan (Garden of Evil), a Pulitzer Prize-winning former crime reporter for The Miami Herald who has once again devised a classically molded whodunit with more twists and turns than a bucketful of night crawlers. Buchanan's trademark one-liners are in fine form as usual: "The corpse was as fresh as the sea air." But Buchanan is less successful in developing her characters; we don't care when Montero coos to her cat or sidles into the requisite bumbling romance with a detective. And do we really need the bizarre wheelchair-bound man who secretly films everyone? A newspaperwoman like Buchanan ought to know better than to clog up a finely tuned plot with such far-fetchery. (Morrow, $24)
Bottom Line: Crafty crime story
My Life (So Far)
by Charlotte Church
Your celebrity radar would miss her on a crowded street, but if you heard her sing, you'd stop and gawp. Meet Charlotte Church, an ordinary girl with an otherworldly voice. She has sung for such leaders of the free world as the Pope, former President Clinton and Rosie O'Donnell, and, at 13, she became the youngest artist ever to make Billboard's Top 30. That first album, Voice of an Angel, went double platinum.
Chronicling her rise from bubbly Welsh schoolgirl to superstar, Church amiably demonstrates that she is devoted to her art and her family, not to mention her cuddly toys and shopping. In her discussions of the mechanics of singing, she has a viewpoint as fresh as her instrument. But though Voice of an Angel may-inspire teens, for adult readers it often dissolves into chatter—breathless descriptions of Church's bedroom and verbatim renditions of notes from pals. Church's singing gifts are wonderfully appealing in part because she seems otherwise so ordinary; her book proves it's no act. This is not the voice that made her famous. (Warner, $22.95)
Bottom Line: This Angel warbles better than she writes
by Ruth Reich!
When Ruth Reichl was a restaurant critic, she often wore disguises so chefs wouldn't roll out the red carpet. When she became editor in chief of Gourmet magazine in 1999, off came the wigs; in Apples, a memoir of her early years as a food writer, off comes everything else. When not recalling eating whole frogs in China and grilled cockles in Thailand, Reichl, 53, documents her spicy extramarital affairs, her struggle to get pregnant, and the wackiness of her widowed mother, who, in one funny passage, joins a video dating service.
Reichl's own mother-hood is the centerpiece, though: In 1988 she was forced to give back her adopted baby Gavi to the biological parents. "[Gavi] looked at me trustingly as I handed her over to the woman," Reichl writes movingly. But the book's mix of hedonistic meals, dysfunctional relationships and celebrity chefs feels off-it's like a pizza with pineapples and sardines. (Random House, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Her pot boileth over
by T. Jefferson Parker
Book of the week
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Joe Trona, the mannerly narrator of T. Jefferson Parker's sun-drenched L.A. noir, likes baptisms; he has had 20. They help him feel whole again, the way he was before his father threw acid on him when he was 9 months old, scarring him and bringing him notoriety as the Acid Baby. But after his childhood adoption by Will Trona, an upright Orange County supervisor, Joe grows up to be an amateur P.I., helping Will ferret out corrupt colleagues with jobs like planting bugs and eavesdropping. So when Will is ambushed and killed while ransoming a tycoon's daughter, the muscular Joe, now 24, naturally investigates. "If a man like your father gets killed," a gangster's moll tells him, "his friends do it." Sure enough, Joe discovers that Will's well-connected acquaintances have secrets dirtier than L.A.'s air. If that doesn't keep him busy enough, he is also pursuing his first serious romance, with a sparky TV interviewer, even as the monster who disfigured him suddenly reappears. (Hyperion, $23.95)
Bottom Line: This shhh-amus ought to be famous
>MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER Cynthia Peale
A home for wayward women, a serial killer, Victorian propriety—all of these elements collide in the second of the author's Beacon Hill mystery series. (Doubleday, $22.95)
THE CLOUDS IN MEMPHIS C.J. Hribal
This compelling collection of short stories and novellas gives the Cheever and Updike treatment to the midwestern landscape. (University of Massachusetts Press, $25.95)
THE STREET Lee Gruenfeld
Someone was bound to do it—write a thriller about the dot-com meltdown—and this one is a humdinger. (Doubleday, $23.95)
>Animal Husbandry
In this bestselling 1998 novel, Laura Zigman argues that men should never be treated as objects: They should be treated as animals. Now in paperback (and translated to film for the Ashley Judd vehicle Someone Like You), Zigman's sassy pseudoscientific survival tale reminds us why it hatched a flock of men-are-from-caves stories.
Jane Goodall, a talk show talent booker in her 30s, is days away from moving in with her executive producer sweetie, Ray Brown, when he backs out. Having already given up her apartment, Jane reluctantly accepts an offer to move in with coworker Eddie Alden, a Wilt Chamberlain of the dating scene.
From this perch Jane pays homage to her zoologist namesake by scientifically measuring men's behavior against animals'. Unfortunately, when an editor friend hires Jane to write a magazine sex column based on her findings, the story loses its edge. Zigman's writing is clever, with quirky chapter headings and asides like "[mating scene deleted]." But as "Dr. Marie Goodall," Jane is a hack. Still, the, book delivers plenty of knowing smiles, even if the film mars its message of self-reliance with a pat, made-in-Hollywood ending. (Delta, $12.95)
Bottom Line: Survival of the funniest
- Contributors:
- Amy Waldman,
- Olivia Abel,
- Diane Simon,
- Max Alexander,
- Edward Karam,
- Erica Sanders.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
