The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus

Holly, the frazzled heroine of YA novelist Sones's latest (What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know), is a writer grappling with menopause, a daughter about to go to college, a husband who drives her crazy, and a crippling case of writer's block. Her mother is ill and in the care of an ineffectual doctor who puts her on steroids that make her violent and forgetful. In the midst of the everyday chaos, Holly has to figure out how to redefine herself as life keeps on changing on her. Sones mixes things up by writing the entire story in verse, with different anecdotes related in different types of poems (as with the concrete poem "A Brief History of My Boobs"), but that's where the story's uniqueness ends, as the whimsy of its telling splashes around in the shallow depths of the story itself. Still it's occasionally funny, and its unlikely form may be enough to entice genre enthusiasts looking for something a smidge different. (Apr.)