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devastating that giving it to any parent in the throes of that trauma would be cruel.) “Imperfect Birds” opens during the complicated moment in a family’s life when a child is hovering between ado- lescence and adulthood. “Life with most teenagers,” Lamott notes, “was like having a low-grade bladder in- fection. It hurt, but you had to tough it out.” Rosie Ferguson is 17 years old, an accomplished athlete and student in a quiet, tie-dyed, vegan community out- side San Francisco referred to as “May- berry on acid.”Her mother, Elizabeth, is anxious about the “many evils that pull on our children,” but she has reason to be hopeful, too. With the comic hy- perbole we love her for, Lamott cap- tures the conflicted feelings of many

parents

counting down to high school grad- uation: “On good days, when every- one got along, Elizabeth believed she’d die when Ro- sie left, keen forever like an Irish fisher- man’s widow. On bad days, she felt like a prisoner at the Level 1 Reception Area in Pel- ican Bay, marking off the days on the prison wall until Rosie’s graduation.” That’s the tension that powers this story, the parental schizophrenia that Lamott de- scribes with such sympathy and tenderness: feeling disgusted by your child’s behavior and living in terror of losing her. What parent can’t relate to Elizabeth’s late-night prayer: “Could you please do only a lit- tle bit of everything, and not get in trou- ble with it, and live to be eighteen, and not scare me to death? Very often? Please please please.” And what teen- ager hasn’t delivered Rosie’s urgent plea? “Can’t you pay less attention to me?” The story that develops is not partic- ularly plot-heavy, but it never seems slow or static. Elizabeth is a recovering alcoholic doing her best to stay clean and upbeat. Her husband, Rosie’s step- father, has recently gotten a job writing a column for public radio, which begins to absorb more and more of his time. “They gave Rosie a lot of independ- ence,” Lamott writes, “partly because she seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders, had never gotten into any real trouble, but mostly because she did so well at school.” Lamott takes us through Rosie’s sum-

mer before senior year and shows us the girl’s gradual slide into a life of re- flexive lying, risky sex and ecumenical substance abuse: friends’ ADD medica- tion, parents’ Valium, cough syrup, ec- stasy, mushrooms, acid, marijuana, al- cohol, cigarettes, ketamine, cocaine, LSD, horse tranquilizers, etc., etc. And Rosie is an accomplished chemist when it comes to beating the urine tests her mother resorts to. The perspective switches back and forth from Rosie’s self-destructive be-

She tells her mom: “I got all A’s last term. I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid.” She just also happens to be a shoplifting, sex-bartering, pill-popping liar.

KLMNO

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010

LITERARY CALENDAR

THURSDAY | Anne Lamott reads from and signs “Imperfect Birds” at 7:30 p.m. at Borders Books, Route 7 at Columbia Pike, Baileys Crossroads, 703-998-0404. For more literary events, go to washingtonpost.com/gog and search “book event.”

FOR YOUNG READERS

The nest empties too soon

havior to Elizabeth’s panicked efforts to figure out what’s going wrong. But La- mott remains impressively dispassion- ate, recording Rosie’s descent without a hint of “Go Ask Alice” preachiness. In- stead, she allows the slow burn of this tragedy to smolder. It’s a startlingly honest depiction of middle-class teen- age life in all its baffling contradictions. Rosie is a wonderful girl, funny, bright and loving, a great counselor at the lo- cal Bible camp. She’s absolutely right when she tells her mom: “I got all A’s last term. I’m holding down two jobs. I’m a good kid.” She just also happens to be a shop- lifting, sex-bartering, pill- popping liar. And Lamott never loses that arresting sense of Rosie’s conflicted mind. Even in the middle of her most irresponsible behavior, this young woman “craved a mo- ment with her mother, on the couch at home, doing nothing togeth- er, letting her mom comb her hair with those mothering fingers.” What’s so fright- ening is that this tragedy takes place even though Rosie and her par- ents have such a

good relationship. Elizabeth talks to her daughter openly and freely about sex, about alcohol, about her friends’ crazy behavior.

She’s old-fashioned enough to read her daughter’s diary, but modern enough to feel guilty about abusing her daugh- ter’s trust. Rosie and Elizabeth

fight and make up the way you’d want any family to function. If there’s a New Age voice in this

novel, it’s mercifully off to the side, in the form of a friend whom Elizabeth adores but treats with refreshing skep- ticism. When Elizabeth hears that LOVE means Letting Others Voluntari- ly Evolve, she writes it down, but notes that it sounds “very kicky.” Lamott has spent enough time thinking about the hard elements of a spiritual life to know that not every inspiring platitude has real substance. Unfortunately, “Imperfect Birds” is a sequel to two novels published 13 and 27 years ago, “Crooked Little Heart” (1997) and “Rosie” (1983). Even ardent fans will have trouble recalling the de- tails of those earlier stories, and though “Imperfect Birds” reads well on its own, there are a few distracting allusions and confusing holes. But don’t let that stop you. This is a

mature, thoughtful novel about an all- too-common family crisis, and in typ- ical Lamott fashion, it doesn’t ignore the pain or exalt in despair. The salva- tion she offers in these pages is hard- won.

charlesr@washpost.com

Charles is the fiction editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.

twitter.com/roncharles.

SHAKESPEARE MAKES THE PLAYOFFS

By Ron Koertge

Candlewick. $15.99, ages 12 and up

’Tis that time of year when, to quote Tennyson, “a

young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” — as well as baseball and poetry if that guy is Kevin Boland, nicknamed “Shakespeare” by his team- mates for his versifying skills. “Lightly,” though, doesn’t exactly capture the turns and twists that Kevin’s feelings take toward two very different girls in this series of 122 linked poems. “Confusedly,” or sometimes “comically,” seems more apt. Kevin be- gins to realize he has little in common with his green-obsessed girlfriend, Mira, who spends her time cleaning up litter, advocating for polar bears and requesting love poems lush with her name. The young bard then meets Amy at an open-mike poetry reading. She appreciates his blank verse, he ad- mires her sestina, and soon the two poetry pals are trading verses via e-mail and phone. Problems en- sue: Mira’s jealousy, the appearance of Amy’s artis- tic boyfriend, and Kevin’s ambivalence about his widowed dad’s attempts at dating. The boy’s got to keep his head in the game, though, particularly as his neighborhood team moves into the playoffs. In this novel-in-poems, author Ron Koertge successful- ly couples the tension and drive of a good story with the imagery and compression of fine poetry. He cuts against the stereotypes of dumb jocks and Goth po- ets to create a smart, every-guy protagonist whose down-to-earth voice and contemporary concerns re- fresh centuries-old poetic forms such as the villa- nelle, couplet, limerick and haiku. With this book, Koertge steps up to the plate — two outs, bases loaded — and stylistically knocks it out of the park.

— Mary Quattlebaum

UBIQUITOUS

By Joyce Sidman Illustrated by Beckie Prange

Houghton Mifflin. $17, ages 5 and up

We have gone forth and multiplied, but, compara- tively speaking, humans haven’t been around that long and can’t multiply like bacteria. In this book about species that have endured as well as spread around the world, Joyce Sidman and Beckie Prange follow the winning format of their “Song of the Water Boatman” (2005): a paragraph of factual informa- tion, an eye-catching illustration and a poem — all about a certain form of life. Starting with bacteria, double-page spreads are devoted to — in order of their appearance on Earth — mollusks, lichens, sharks, beetles, diatoms, geckos, ants, grasses, squirrels, crows, dandelions and coyotes. The poems spring wonderfully from the well-conveyed facts, but Sidman also looks for the personality of each species. The breathless prose poem “Tail Tale,” for instance, nicely captures the quickness of the squirrel: “Sure dogs run fast but what can they do in a tree nothing besides paw the trunk and stare at us hungrily as we dash from limb to limb sailing out over the leaves with our parachute tails which by the way also act as umbrella, float, flag, rudder, and the warmest, softest, coziest quilt you could ever imagine.” The last spread features a lovely illustration of a very young human, sitting up- right and armed with a purple pen. We can’t clone ourselves every 20 minutes as bacteria do, but we are everywhere and, according to “Baby,” we have a certain life-force: “If unsupervised, / climbs, builds, explores, creates, unravels / Leaves marvels / and messes / behind.”

— Abby McGanney Nolan

ISTOCKPHOTOS.COM PHOTO

An updated ‘Tempest’ — with blimps and robots

S

by Elizabeth Hand

THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION

By Dexter Palmer St. Martin’s 340 pp. $24.99

tandardized testing has come under fire of late — all those questions, and who makes them up, anyway? Surely, only a wizard could parse the shadings of meaning among, say, “prodigious,” “wondrous,” “ex- travagant” and “admirable.” It turns out there is a sort of wizard behind the words, a GRE/SAT test developer named Dexter Palmer, and he has written an extrava- gantly wondrous and admirable first novel inspired by “The Tempest.” Palmer’s “The Dream of Perpetual Motion” riffs on Shake- speare’s play by setting it in an alternate America powered by Rube Goldberg engi- neering and overseen by the brilliant, mad Prospero Taligent. Prospero — “reclusive genius, the richest person in the known world, the inventor of the mechanical man” — is head of a global concern that manufactures the automata, cameras obscurae, hydrogen-fueled zeppelins and clockwork orchestras that are as ubiqui- tous in Palmer’s imaginary world as com- puters, the Internet and airplanes are in ours.

He and his adopted daughter, Miranda, live in the immense Taligent Tower, waited upon by mechanical servants and surrounded by ma- chine-generated vistas of tropical beaches and desert isles. Like her Shakespearean namesake, Miran- da has grown up without the company of oth- er humans. But for her 10th birthday, Pros- pero invites 100 lucky children to a party in her honor, including the novel’s narrator, Harold Winslow. In a scene reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Fac- tory,” Prospero promises each child a gift: “Each and every one of you will have your heart’s desires fulfilled.”Harold, chosen to sit beside Miranda, wishes to be a storyteller. Prospero tries to dissuade him: “Storytelling — that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s made up of mo- ments and fragments, and stories won’t sur- vive.” Harold and Miranda are dogged by heart- break and thwarted romance as they grow up, and Prospero’s clockwork world gradually spins out of control. Imprisoned by the in- ventor in a vast zeppelin propelled by a motor “the size of a child’s fist,” Harold records the

MIRROR MIRROR

A Book of Reversible Verse

By Marilyn Singer

dreamlike events that brought him there and, by recounting them to us, achieves his heart’s desire. Palmer’s publisher is touting his novel as steampunk, but the work it most resembles is Angela Carter’s hallucinatory tour de force “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman” (1972, released in this country as “The War of Dreams”), whose protagonist also makes his way through a nightmarish al- ternate future to confront a perpetual motion machine. Yet Palmer’s vision is his own, with its Henry Dargeresque dream sequences and Crystal Palace cityscapes: an elegy for our own century and the passing of the power of the word, written and spoken. “This world will begin and end in silence,” says one doomed character. But not even a desert island is forever emp-

ty. As Shakespeare’s Caliban says, “The isle is full of noises.” In his airship prison, Harold eventually breaks his self-imposed spell of si- lence and utters the words that will renew this beautiful broken world.

bookworld@washpost.com

Hand’s novel “Illyria” will be published this spring.

Illustrated by Josée Masse Dutton. $16.99, ages 8 and up

Try writing a poem that, when read backward, still

makes sense but means the exact opposite. Now il- lustrate it with a picture that does the same thing when split down the middle or divided top-to-bottom. Give up? Reading “Mirror Mirror” provides a jovial in- centive to try writing a “reverso,” a unique and intrigu- ing form created by Marilyn Singer. In this intriguing collection, each poem is a highly abbreviated version of a traditional fairy tale — of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel — which turns the familiar into something surprising. “Rumpelstiltskin,” for example, cleverly begins by asking readers to name the title character (which is, after all, the central question of the tale). But the reverso version ends by asking read- ers to identify the traditionally nameless heroine. The accompanying illustration — lushly colored and highly stylized — groups the elements of the story in a circle: A spinning wheel at the center morphs into the round entrance of the little gnome’s cave; smoke from the fire at the cave’s entrance rises to spell out the secret name before drifting off to create spun gold, which connects to the straw, which becomes the sticks, which feed the fire. And that’s only one of more than a dozen remarkable puzzle-poem-pictures. Sound like fun? Read. Reverse. Get ready to write!

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