The Darling of the Blackrock Desert

Newman (The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies) serves up a collection of artful if rambling novellas set in the 20th-century American West. The sinuous title entry takes place in 1964 Reno, Nev., where ambitious college student Julie’s dreams of becoming a school principal are dashed after she picks up hitchhiker Howi, a young Sioux man, and they begin a romance. Julie unexpectedly gets pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, Nia, who has no hands. The rest of the narrative traces the family’s adjustment to Nia’s disability, her coming-of-age, and the aftermath of a family tragedy after she leaves for college in Boise. In “City of Angels,” an unlikely friendship forms between an art student and a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vet, who meet and hang out at the Los Angeles Library in 1986, and whose lives are changed by the famous fire there. Another fire figures into “Saints of Death Valley,” about an orphan raised by an eccentric family in Death Valley, where their house is consumed by a deadly blaze. Though the stories are baggy, Newman has a gift for jumping gracefully from one point of view to another and revealing the connections between multiple characters. Patient readers will enjoy these intriguing byways. Agent: Kathryn Green, Kathryn Green Literary. (Mar.)