cover image Someone Else's Child

Someone Else's Child

Nancy Woodruff. Simon & Schuster, $23 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-684-86507-2

Woodruff's earnestly felt but timidly executed family drama concerns the consequences of a tragic car crash involving teenagers in a wealthy Connecticut suburb. Matt Fallon, a 15-year-old home-schooled boy whose family has recently moved to the wealthy town of Sheldrake from Oregon, is driving two girls home from a party one night when the car goes out of control. Matt is unharmed, but the girls are killed. The girls' best friend, Tara Breeze, whose incipient crush on Matt began at the swimming pool they all frequented, would also have been in the car if her mother, 34-year-old Jennie, had not been at the hospital giving birth to a new baby daughter. In alternating chapters told from Matt's and Jennie's points of view, Woodruff recounts the shock, grieving and gradual attempts at healing of all the families concerned. A new mother again after so many years, Jennie has to contend with physical weariness and the mood swings of her teenage daughter while also trying to run her business organizing high school reunions. Compassion for Matt, charged with reckless homicide and ostracized by the community, leads Jennie to offer him a summer job working for her; however, their growing love for each other, although the kernel of the novel, remains unnamed until the last pages. Woodruff's bland writing style keeps the novel from rising far above standard ""women's fiction,"" but there is a satisfying integrity in her portrayal of settled, ordinary people visited by disaster and called upon to make far-reaching decisions. (July)