Sights

Set around 1960, this commanding debut novel of eccentric outsiders shaking things up in a small town features a narrative voice of startling originality. From the beginning, it's unclear how much Baby Girl can be trusted; she says she was in the womb for 11 and a half months and remembers being delivered in a veterinarian's office. Her father, she reports with undampened spirits, has tried several times to kill her. When Baby Girl is 13, a particularly brutal attack opens her mother's eyes, and the two of them flee. They settle in tiny Cot, apparently named for the apricots it produces, and rely on their special skills: her mother sews party dresses and Baby Girl, who can see the future (though she doesn't always interpret her visions correctly), does a reading with every fitting. But when Baby Girl starts high school (the school motto: ""Where Boys Are Athletes and Girls Are Apricots""), her perceptions of herself are overthrown and the audience is challenged to form a new picture, too. Baby Girl's na vet is by turns hilarious and poignant. She describes her friend Selda as ""the only known mulatto in Cot. Meaning she was one part Negro and one part Crustacean, same's the rest of us."" The story often reads like up-ended Southern gothic with furtive romances, impassioned jealousy, more murder attempts, all relayed through Baby Girl's own loopy perspective. And the author's delivery of her message that the future is not what Baby Girl can foresee but what she can make of it is as fresh as can be. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)