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Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie
Random House

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I've been thinking about someone named Ann Ransom lately, trying to puzzle her out. She's the narrator of this "novel in stories," nine interlocked tales by a shockingly assured first-time author who lives in Santa Cruz. In each successive story, Ann is a little older, living as regular a suburban life as any of us did. And yet, how normal is that? And why does hers turn out the way it does?

"My mother and I lived alone then," the first story begins (Ann is seven), "in a pink bungalow in Long Beach, with a small yard full of gopher holes and the smell of the refinery settling over everything we had. We couldn't leave our glasses on the shelves a week without them gathering a fine mist of oil. I thought we had a real life anyway, before my mother started over." The ease of this telling, its small, salient details and quiet foreshadowing use of "then" and "anyway," immediately takes you into the narrator's world, already curious and caring about her.

In this story, her mother marries, moves the family to Encino, and has a baby; meanwhile, Ann's hard-charging grandmother takes her to Europe. In the next, two years older, Ann is settled into her new home when her grandmother abruptly whisks her off to live in Santa Barbara. The grandmother and mother aren't simple opposing forces, though, urbane sophistication versus empty tract-home living. For one thing, Ann's mother hates suburbia. By the third story, she is rushing home from neighborhood barbecues and falling into bed with the blinds closed.

You might feel it all sounds too close to mundane real life to be interesting, but what's most wonderful about these thoroughly entertaining stories is how subtle they are. That third story holds some keys to understanding the adult Ann has become in the final two tales. (Given how smart and self-aware she is, her situation is more precarious than you'd have expected.) But because this is a book of stories, you don't read it as you would a novel: its themes and links and telling points are less overt or distinct, clearest often in hindsight. That's why I've been thinking about Ann so much.

It's as if we've been her friend or neighbor, watching her grow up. (And isn't this one of the reasons we love fiction? To meet characters who inhabit our minds as much as any living creatures?) Ann has told me everything she plans to say about her life, and I am still mulling over the way it turned out, and why.