FACING FORWARD: Finding Hope to Begin Again

In this very personal story, Zoba retraces the path that led her from an alcoholic home to her current midlife crisis. The first section deals with her childhood, and in it she thickly describes everything from her visit as an adult to American Girl Place to the minute details of the neighborhoods where she grew up. Included in what seems an attempt to create mood and add literary weight, these observations sometimes serve as little more than a distraction. Her second part explores her feelings about motherhood, and unfortunately feels self-aggrandizing and self-pitying at the same time. In it, she depicts herself as a wonderful mother and her sons as delightful boys who have become godly young men. While sadness is an understandable response to an empty nest, her interpretation of their departure for college as abandonment borders on melodrama. Zoba's last section is perhaps the strongest, in that it pulls together the threads of the first two parts, disclosing the many battles she has had to fight all at once during her forties. Chapters about September 11 and her participation in a forum on gay-evangelical relations turn up inexplicably in this section; the former covers territory that is by now too well-worn. Still, a good deal of the book is a lovely meditation on faith and the vagaries of midlife, and as such should resonate with many readers. (Jan.)