Love Like That

Duffy-Comparone gives voice to a wide range of women and girls leading hardscrabble lives in her bold debut collection. In “The Zen Thing,” Anita, 23, endures her family’s eccentricities during an annual beach vacation with her older art professor turned boyfriend in tow. Here, as in all the stories, the prose packs a punch: “The narrative of an affair [is] much more reasonable than the living of it, which is, when you get right down to it, a clusterfuck,” Anita reflects. “Marvel Sands” is an exquisite story of 15-year-old Ann’s sexual awakening after she takes a job to escape living in the cramped apartment of her mom’s boyfriend, Ronny, “one side of a defeated-looking duplex.” In “The Package Deal,” the author blazes through the labyrinthine terrain of step-motherhood as a woman develops a relationship with a divorced man and his difficult eight-year-old son. In the marvelous title story, a woman upends her life to care for her hapless brother. Duffy-Comparone nails her characters in a mere few words (when Anita’s mother gets hot flashes, she yanks her bra from her sleeve “like a rabbit from a hat”), often placing them in a realistically oppressive atmosphere (Ronny, according to Ann, wears “hostile cologne” along with his netted sports jerseys). Heartrending prose and a sprinkling of humor make this one a winner. (Mar.)