Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

Linked anecdotes about the perils of young womanhood from Australian author Wood trendily play off of antediluvian diction and antiquated women's advice columns, but actually possesses some hard-won wisdom. Divided into themes such as virginity, truth, art, commitment, marriage and loss, the tales treat the predictable muddle of female experience, though in the feisty literary persona of not such a ""good girl."" Indeed, the first story, ""The Deflowering of Rosie Little,"" finds the narrator, at 14, eager to look up Latin words in the dictionary used in sexual relations, losing her virginity in the most demeaning fashion at a party to a coarse lager lout who offers her a popular cocktail for girls called ""Rene Pogel"" (read it backward). In another wacky tale that goes off the rails into reality, ""Rosie Little in the Mother Country,"" the narrator, now 17, is sent for a long visit to her childless godparents' house back in England, where the joyless, emotionally numbed couple finds Rosie's sexual vivacity unnerving and finally insupportable. Despite corny sidebars on penis sizes, pubic hairstyling, and ""Nominative Determinism"" (you are what you're named), Wood addresses real issues: domestic violence, abortion and the desire to be married with children, among others. What emerges is a sense of destiny for Rosie, a woman who works hard-as a newspaper reporter and an assistant purser on an American cruise ship, among other things-and senses intuitively that a life of heartstrings' unraveling is surely worth a pull or two.