Media-friendly Daum has popped up everywhere from NPR to Oprah to talk about her transformation from spendthrift New York City journalist to well-adjusted writer living in Nebraska. She has also spun the experience into this funny, literate first novel. Lucinda Trout, an N.Y.C. TV reporter, dreams of more: a Sam Shepard-like man and a sense of self-worth that goes beyond reporting on "how roomy a thong can really be." When she lands in fictional Prairie City for a story, she finds "the tug of that land was as strong and invisible as gravity" and negotiates a year of bliss there by promising to file Quality of Life Reports about barn dances and bathing in rivers. Expecting to be a big fish in a small pond, Lucinda finds that she's just a fish out of water.
Daum has an eye for the telling detail and interesting things to say about how priorities get rearranged—when people value their pets over each other, for instance. Though the humor can be gross (both child laxatives and horse semen feature), this is a surprising, entertaining and often touching story of a single woman lurching into her thirties looking for love and fulfillment, but mostly just finding herself. (Viking, $24.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Top Quality
By Anna Maxted
Like a lot of chick-lit heroines living in London today, sweet Holly Apple-ton, 28, has to make some adult decisions, especially about her loser fiancé, Nick. An owner of a dating agency, Holly has the usual sitcom-style friends and siblings. But Maxted must yearn to be a soap-opera writer: What her crew experiences in three months—a rape, a coming out, an adoption and business reversals—would make the cast of The Young and the Restless cluck in sympathy. A few funny moments (a bad meal causes flatulence that "could have powered a hot-air balloon from London to Colorado") are surrounded by angst and therapy-speak ("You have no power over what has happened to you, but you have every power over what happens to you next"). This soap drowns in suds. (ReganBooks, $24.95)
BOTTOM LINE: Weepy where it should be witty
By Tom Robbins
Robbins, as lyrical a counterculture hero as has ever tuned in and turned on, is to words what Uri Geller is to spoons: He bends sentences into playful escapades. Now 66, Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker, Another Roadside Attraction) is as frisky as ever. His eighth novel, set in Asia, is a folkloric romp about Tanuki, a hedonistic Japanese creature resembling a badger, who loves sex and sake. The dizzy plot leaps to the tale of three American MIAs who chose to stay in Laos after the Vietnam War ended. They meet a female circus trainer who may be a descendant of Tanuki's via an interspecies fling. Is Robbins making a statement about our inability to change our core selves? Probably, but when the writing is this lively—even mayonnaise is as "yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant"—who needs deeper meaning? (Bantam, $24)
BOTTOM LINE: Another bedside attraction
By Kristin Hannah
Seattle divorce attorney Meghann Dontess knows all about severing soured relationships but not much about what makes a good one. She is judgmental and condescending, especially about her younger half sister Claire, a single mom who runs a campground. When Claire gets engaged, it's an ideal backdrop for a look at family dynamics and romance that's entertaining and enlightening, if occasionally hard to swallow.
Bestselling author Hannah writes witty dialogue with a firm grasp of the you-push-my-buttons-I'll-push-yours school of sibling relations. Less convincing, though, is the architect of the girls' dysfunction, their mother, an aging actress who makes Joan Rivers look demure. It doesn't take a genius to figure out Meghann is deeply insecure and wants to restore the bond she shared with her little sister before Mom abandoned them for Hollywood. But give Hannah credit for bringing snap and a lot of warmth to a familiar lesson: that contentment comes from accepting each other's flaws. (Ballantine, $23.95)
BOTTOM LINE: A pleasant visit with Hannah and her sisters
By Margaret Atwood
The last time Atwood wrote about the future, in 1985's The Handmaid's Tale, her grim vision of sexual totalitarianism weighed down every page. Her new novel offers an even darker view of things to come, yet this book dances with energy and sophisticated gallows humor. Bio-engineering, her agent of doom, is also a running gag that allows Atwood to invent hybrid animals (such as pigoons, for growing replacement organs) and to riff on what genetic tampering might do for fast food or beauty products.
The narrator, Snowman, appears to be the sole survivor of a global holocaust, left to scavenge among the ruins and protect a group of gentle clones. Sifting through fragmented memories to figure out what befell the human race, he recalls his childhood in barricaded research campuses that had a sinister hidden agenda. The suspense builds through flashbacks to a twist that eerily echoes today's SARS scare. But the book's true delight is its rich social satire. Atwood conjures up smart wallpaper, shirtsleeve e-mail-which delivers a little poke in the ribs for each new message-and neon herpes. Her wry wit makes dystopia fun. (Doubleday, $26)
BOTTOM LINE: A brilliant future
By Joseph O'Connor
Beginning in 1845 a fungal blight destroyed nearly all of the potato plants in Ireland, leaving most of the population starving. The result was one of the largest mass migrations in history, as the Irish began cramming onto ships bound for America. It is on one such ship that O'Connor (whose sister is singer Sinéad) stages this novel, an ambitious, superb, even uplifting tale of the Irish flight from horror. Characters such as Pius Mulvey, a crippled wretch forced to become an assassin, are drawn with layer upon layer of vivid background. Along the way O'Connor even brings in a thoroughly gripping murder mystery that is all the more affecting for the depth he gives his characters. They add up to a powerfully symbolic microcosm of the time. (Harcourt, $25)
BOTTOM LINE: Shining Star
My Recent Favorites
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple and the new book of poems, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, shares some beloved titles:
Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu: "It's a memoir about Yang's life growing up in a tribal community in China. It sounded a lot like the South. It could've been Alabama or Georgia."
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd: A biography of the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God "masterfully collects all the pieces of this woman's life."
19 Varieties of Gazelle by Naomi Shihab Nye: Poems with "a real feeling for the people of Palestine."
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron: "Ancient methods of opening your heart and dealing with negative emotions."
The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Some: "One of the all-time great books, especially for African-Americans."
- Contributors:
- Edward Nawotka,
- Lan Nguyen,
- Peter Hyman,
- Debby Waldman,
- Lee Aitken,
- Scott Nybakken.
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!
