MY MOTHER'S LOVERS

Poet, short story writer and essayist Passanante brings strengths honed in other genres to her first novel, about a girl who absorbs the betrayals and secrets of the adults in her life and then adds to these a few of her own. Lake Rose Davis lives in Idaho with her parents, forming a trio of outsiders: 13-year-old Lake is precocious but lonely; her hippie parents, Mimi and Kirk, are out of place in their conservative town. Rather than banding together, each retreats into a separate world. The star of the novel is Lake's mother, Mimi, an extravagantly narcissistic painter whose closest relationships are with Dyl, her oldest friend, and Graceanne, a Native American woman who works in a local beauty parlor. In a series of discomfiting revelations, Lake discovers herself by learning the truth about Mimi, whose exhibitionism hides as much as it reveals. A year later, when Lake becomes gravely ill, she is sent to St. Louis, where she is cared for by grandparents she has never met, then moves in with her flamboyant Aunt DeeDee. Although when she was younger she thought of DeeDee as "a beacon lighting the way out of [her] lonely life," their relationship becomes strained; they even find themselves in competition for the attentions of the same man. Passanante has a gift for rendering the most shattering events with subtlety and ambiguity—though the latter at times gets the better of the plot—but while the narrative is not always easy to follow, it's worth the effort. (Mar. 1)