Li'l Mama's Rules

Thirty-year-old Madison McGuire thinks she knows how to survive the dating game in L.A.'s upper-middle-class African American community. Determined not to be hurt, she scribbles rules in a little pink book. She has dumped her college love, med student Christopher Anzel, for cheating on her and devotes herself to teaching at an all-black private school, insuring a good education for her 14-year-old sister, Serena, afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome. When the jilted Christopher comes to L.A. to open a clinic in Watts, he again declares his love for Madison, and the couple resume a stormy courtship. Then Madison stumbles across the obit of an ex-football celebrity with whom she shared a single night five years ago and discovers that he died of AIDS. Ever responsible, Madison gets herself tested, and the result comes back HIV-positive the same day she accepts Charles's marriage proposal. Now this self-protective ""Lil Mama"" must question how much control any of us really have over our fates. With the honesty and perception she displayed in her first novel, Caught Up in the Rapture, Jackson explores the paradoxical way the shadow of death inspires one woman to open up and trust. It's a solid, unsentimental but uplifting tale with good characterization of fallible people caught in a terrible dilemma. (June)