You're So Beautiful: Stories

This strong debut collection offers 10 slices of Midwestern life. In ""Chicken Train,"" a high-school teacher at a family barbecue, missing his own youth, finds himself lusting after a ripe 13-year-old who has inspired similar feelings in his son. In ""Reading Braille,"" a blind woman proves more adept at seeing the world than her sighted friend. The twin dangers of female attractiveness and obedience are chillingly limned in the title story: in a town where one girl has already been murdered, a confused teenager responds to the unwanted advances of two men--one of them her elder brother--with inertia and cheerleading. FitzGerald renders even distasteful characters oddly compelling, injecting suspense into common occurrences. In ""Zoo Bus,"" a mean, tart-tongued elderly woman tries to buy affection with $100 bills. The quirky ""Sister Boom-Boom"" showcases FitzGerald's expertise at peeling away layers one at a time to expose the surprising center of a story. Ex-wife Jean (who is also an ex-nun) learns to stop obsessing about her ex-husband (who was once a priest) and his replacement bride of five years, but not before giving the new wife's perfect tomato a nasty surreptitious pinch while waiting in line at the grocer's. If there is a unifying theme to these stories, it is the humbling gap between expectations and reality with which the characters must come to terms. (Oct.)