Glimmer

Some technical sleight-of-hand will likely distract readers from this ambitious novel about a young biracial woman's search for identity. The main narrator is Sage Taylor, the youngest child of a white mother and a black father who met during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. A pre-med college freshman in Connecticut, Sage is the only one of the five Taylor children who is visibly biracial--her siblings all look white. Currently holed up in her dorm room, she tells how she is being stalked by Steven Carney, a law graduate she met very briefly on Martha's Vineyard. Fat and boyfriendless, Sage hunkers down with photos, letters and her own ""fear list"" as she reports that Steven lurks in the halls. In addition to these photos and letters, different pieces of this fractured story are told by various narrators. By phone Sage reassures her siblings of her social and academic well-being, but in reality she is grappling with her biracial legacy. Her mother, a doctor, is strong but somewhat remote, and Sage has never met her father. As she downspirals into delusion and debilitation, her siblings converge on her dorm room to help her learn the truth about her parents. Waters displays keen social insight and and turns a number of fine phrases, but her story begs to be made more substantial than its episodic structure allows. (May)