April Rising

""Who's been sleeping in my bed?"" takes on new meaning in Lema tre's fractured fairy tale, a scathingly zany take on Goldilocks. When 20-something Ellen Kaplan returns home to suburban Philmont, Pa., after a two-year romp through Europe, she expects to find her family unchanged. Unfortunately for Ellen, her bed has been taken over by her brother James's new girlfriend, April, a junk-food-eating, born-again Christian from a blue-collar family in California. In addition to displaying April's collection of porcelain Jesuses, the formerly macrobiotic Kaplans now stock the pantry with Doritos and Tastykakes to please the intruder, and at her urging, James is about to abandon his philosophy Ph.D. at Berkeley in favor of a career as a trash collector. Although Ellen did not send a single postcard during her travels, she resolves to recover her rightful place in the family, wresting power away from April before it's too late. A domestic war is soon raging, but before long Ellen is forced to acknowledge that she and April have more in common than she would like to admit. Though she is, as her father says, ""lazy, spoiled and megalomaniacal,"" Ellen is also a wittily acerbic narrator, and her descriptions of secondary characters like her technologically precocious younger brother, Matthew, who lives in the basement with his computer, are sharp and funny. Lema tre spells out the Goldilocks connection early on, rather than trusting readers to put two and two together on their own, and some of the novel's satirical observations are shrill. Still, when a series of epiphanies causes Ellen to recognize that she has not been betrayed by her family, but rather has wronged them by taking them for granted, irony is subsumed by a story with a moral for spoiled children everywhere. (Jan.) FYI: Lema tre hosts a Philadelphia TV talk show, Authors Etc.