Evening News

After a painful divorce from her high school sweetheart Ed, a happy remarriage and the birth of her second child, Trina, seem to grant 29-year-old Giselle another chance at life. But the ""biological faultlines"" that run below the seemingly solid surface of her harmonious California family--composed of Giselle, husband Dan, Trina and nine-year-old Teddy, Giselle's son by Ed--are revealed to Giselle in an agonizing flash on the afternoon that Teddy accidentally kills Trina while playing with the next-door neighbor's loaded gun. As the grieving Dan retreats headlong into resentment of Teddy, Giselle finds herself torn between the desire to protect her son and the urge to punish him. Even mother love, she learns, may have its limits. Novelist and short-story writer Swick (Paper Wings), who nimbly alternates viewpoints between Giselle and the sweet, guilt-wracked Teddy, explores her characters' dilemma with sensitivity, in limpid, colloquial prose. But the novel's ambling pace defuses the tension inherent in the situation, and the slightly generic quality of Swick's characterizations muffles their emotional resonance. Still, readers will quietly cheer the book's unlikely hero: it is Ed, Giselle's taciturn ex-husband, formerly a millstone around Giselle's neck, whose loyalty to his lost spouse and son proves a lifeline. 100,000 first printing. (Feb.)