Two women a generation apart meet and work to overcome their hurt in this flawed but sympathetic first novel from Addonizio, a poet (Tell Me
) and short story writer (In the Box Called Pleasure
). In L.A.'s Long Beach, 34-year-old Diana McBride is working her latest dead-end job, at the children's store Teddy's World, when very young mother-to-be Jamie Ramirez comes in and buys a bear, but ends up burying it at the beach, along with her frustrations at impending kicked-out-of-the-house single motherhood. Addonizio alternates perspectives chapter-by-chapter, switching from Diana to Jamie to Jamie's unborn child, Stella ("I chose you, Stella tells her. I'm not going to let you just hand me over to somebody else"). The awkward results feel like a first-time novelist's cop-out on multiple characters. Addonizio has a great ear for what the OCD-afflicted Diana and the deluded, late-adolescent Jamie say to themselves, but the means by which Jamie ends up at Diana's apartment, along with Great Guy Anthony who has come to Jamie's roadside aid, feel contrived. After some trouble, strife and a serious scare with newborn Stella, things work out with a heartwarming complexity, but Addonizio hasn't fashioned a strong enough container for her characters' powerful feelings. Agent, Robert McQuilkin
. (Aug.)
