Fiction

The plot clips wackily along from there. Addonizio demonstrates a light touch about weighty matters -- mental illness, love and loss, the responsibilities of parenting, suicide. Ultimately, her message is upbeat: It's possible to cope with all sorts of adversity, you never know when a twist of fate might drop redemption in your lap, and some talking babies really are funny.

Unhappy Families in Their Own Way

In The Woodsman's Daughter (Viking, $24.95), Gwyn Hyman Rubio has tried to write a sprawling Southern saga, à la Gone With the Wind , with feminist overtones. Told in three parts, the novel starts in the late 1800s with ne'er-do-well Georgia turpentine farmer Monroe Miller. A rough, restless man hiding an awful secret, Miller behaves cruelly toward his sickly, laudanum-addicted wife and blind, ailing daughter. Another daughter, Dalia, is the only one to survive Daddy's drinking and dastardly deeds.

Dalia strikes out on her own in part two, bagging a creepy dentist husband who gives her a son she doesn't much love. After husband number one drops dead, Dalia weds a plumpish older lawyer, with whom she has a much-adored daughter, Clara Nell, who becomes the focus of part three.

There would seem to be enough drama and emotion in Rubio's story to make for a decent book, if you like this sort of lengthy epic. But her prose is leaden, her pacing turgid and her three primary characters thoroughly unlikable. There's also a large dose of corn and a plethora of overwrought passages. "Procreation was the price of man's vanity, his hallway of mirrors, reproducing himself over and over," a teenage Dalia decides after seeing Father force himself on Mother. At times, Rubio chooses phrases that are downright strange, like "the obese scent of chicken" that comes wafting from Dalia's kitchen. Then there are the novel's horribly stereotypical African American characters, particularly Dalia's ever-faithful cook, Katie Mae.

Rubio's first novel, Icy Sparks , won a coveted place in Oprah's book club, and Rubio has been hailed as an up-and-coming Southern writer. Let's hope The Woodsman's Daughter is just her sophomore slump.

It's All Happening at the Zoo

Holiday Reinhorn writes disconcerting, edgy stories tinged with dark humor. In one of the 13 pieces in her first published collection, Big Cats (Free Press; paperback, $14.95), the pregnant woman narrator offers a ride to a boy she doesn't know and winds up taking him to her house. Why is she doing this? What does she want with him? Reinhorn doesn't say, but this simple, discomfiting piece -- the plot is so meager it seems odd to even call it a story -- is full of wonderfully original descriptive writing. The boy's filthy baseball mitt "rested on the seat between us like a rotting hand. The leather had a smell, and the smell had a taste. Like childhood, maybe. Like birth." The boy spits his spent chewing gum into the woman's hand, where it plops "gray and mottled as a little brain."

"By the Time You Get This" is a more conventional piece about a couple struggling to accept a horrible loss, but it's infused with Reinhorn's mordant wit. "The last time we were in bed together, it bothered me to look at him, he was in such good shape," muses the wife as she watches her fit husband jog around a Los Angeles reservoir. "I had to turn out the lights right away."

There are a few missteps in the collection. Reinhorn's elliptical style sometimes makes for more confusion than clarity, as in a rambling story ("The White Dog") about a woman and her dying pooch. And her ear for dialogue isn't always accurate. In the title story, about two adolescent girlfriends working in a zoo, an African American zookeeper's speech seems stilted and wrong (she says "my girl," instead of simply "girl"). Minor quibbles aside, Reinhorn writes about misfits and dysfunction in a voice that is clever, distinctive and refreshing. ·

Susan Adams is an editor at Forbes magazine.