This amusing, slightly bizarre novel by Kowalski (Eddie's Bastard)
puts a supernatural spin on a familiar coming-of-age story. Seventeen-year-old tomboy Haley Bombauer lives with her widowed mother in upstate New York. Though they look much like anyone else, the Bombauer women are actually witches—or at least, Haley's reclusive grandmother is. Her mother has given up the family tradition, and Haley herself never took an interest until she breaks her leg and has to spend a summer recuperating indoors. She becomes so bored that she starts messing around with spells. At the urging of her mother, she moves in with her strict, forbidding grandmother, who teaches Haley the healing arts and some other skills. Though Haley is at first resistant, she gradually comes to embrace her special powers. When the outside world threatens to interfere with this dubious education, the old woman and her cabin vanish into thin air. Haley continues to live in the woods on her own; she eventually makes a partial return to civilization as the town healer, but not before she has an unlikely adventure with drug smugglers and a wild sexual encounter with a neighbor boy. Her exploits as a feral woodswoman are implausible even by the loose standards of this book and make for some comically absurd lines ("Note to self: When menstruating, bury used tampons very deep. Something has been digging them up lately. Something big"). Yet Haley is a winning narrator whose dry sense of humor keeps the celebration of womanhood from getting too syrupy. Agent, Anne Hawkins. (Jan.)
