Such Good People

Drawing from her own experience, Hickman, author of the nonfiction Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working through Grief, has written an earnest first novel about how a family copes with the accidental death of a child. The central character is Laura Randall, a full-time housewife who gave up her career as a graphic artist to raise her children. Her husband, Trace, is a kindly, if dry, philosophy professor so consumed by his work that Laura often feels he isn't listening when she recounts her admittedly mundane daily tasks. Their sons, Bart and Philip, are both nice college-age kids. Their youngest child, Annie, is a bright, beautiful and slightly rebellious 16-year-old, who may or may not be having sex with her new boyfriend, but who is definitely tired of her father being so distant and her mother being so prying. When the family goes on summer vacation, Annie is killed in a horseback-riding mishap. The rest of the novel shows Laura and Trace grieving in their different ways (unsurprisingly, she's emotional and he's not). They grow apart and even seek emotional solace--though never sinfully--in the arms of others. This is an example of the novel as a therapeutic tool. The emotions are never false, but they're rarely dramatic, either, and the rather stiff dialogue is spoken by characters who are never more than the sum of their situations. (May)