PUSHED TO SHORE

Novelist Rosellen Brown selected this earnest first novel about a western Montana English as a Second Language schoolteacher for the publisher's Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In the mid-1980s, 35-year-old Janet Hunter leaves her tenure-track job at the University of Montana to devote herself to helping high school–age Hmong and Vietnamese refugees adjust to cacophonous American life. Divorced and lonely herself, Janet is sensitive to her students' concerns, encouraging them to write about their harrowing ordeals—one favorite student with hideous scars on his head writes of his escape from Vietnam in a fishing boat that was "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." Conflicts arise when old world customs clash with new world rules, as when Pao, another of Janet's favorites, is arrested for shooting a deer out of season. Janet's kindly, sometimes misdirected shepherding of her charges wins the reader's sympathy: she takes her class en masse to the mall to explore the "World of Work," attends a Hmong New Year's celebration and grieves when Pao's reluctant acceptance of American medical know-how, in the form of pills for his depression, fails him. Gadbow's characterizations are astute, but her detailed chronicle of Janet's very ordinary life—conversations with single friend Judy, a romance with the lawyer who defends Pao in court, a week's bout with the flu—grows tedious. Most memorable is the novel's sensitive portrayal of the fragile hopes of young Hmong and Vietnamese refugees. (Jan.)