The Book Report: Edie Aberdeen is in BIIIG trouble. We meet her beside a Florida backwoods highway, about to be raped and probably killed by the coyote she's convinced to deliver her there from California, where believe it or not, her problems are a lot worse than rape and probable death. We know this must be so because she's so freakin' Zen calm and California-y about the whole experience.

She's rescued by Sheriff Whitney and Deputy Capron, the latter of whom insists they care for her, they not hold her on vagrancy charges, and Whitney allow him to take the young woman home to his wife for feedin' and nurturin'. After all, a few years back, the Caprons lost their only daughter and this little lassie's about the age that girl would've been....

So begins the swirl of improbable events and unlikely assortments of people in this novel about identity, intention, and betrayal. We learn the secrets of Edie, of the Caprons and the Sheriff, of the shifty, dishonest, unworthy pastor of Christ by the Sea church (whose eventual redemption is so very, very not Christian that I actually took a moment to cheer author Fiore, scaring my dog), and of Mae Carson, whose whole sad hardscrabble life is the throbbing open heart, the inflamed tooth of this deliberate and inevitable first novel.

Troubles there are, troubles there have been and certainly will be, very bad things done and "good" ones undone; but the passage that Fiore's characters go through has just enough joy, just enough chance to smile, just a hint of brighter and better days to come, to make it deeply satisfying to read. To paraphrase Joss Whedon, a favorite storyteller of mine, "If there is a better kind of tale-telling than to take a group of people, set them on a journey, and learn who they really are, I don't know about it." This author Fiore has done, ably, with many graceful turns of phrase and several bold insights.

My Review: But it's a first novel, so there are problems. I am most aware of the length and complexity of the flashbacks in the book. Forward momentum comes to a screeching halt while we're filled in on things we need to know, and a few that're less important to know. Several characters appear, seem important, get the reader invested in them, then *thud* dropped. A sub-plot with Mae Carson's husband is infuriatingly too much *and* too little present or explained.

The Sheriff, whose actions cause havoc at every turn past and present, is a cipher we could stand to know less about, or he should be a full player in the unfolding story. The pastor, as mentioned above, is a slick former player on the national nutball-Christian stage, whose cold wife leaves him and takes all her money with her. The eventual redemption I've alluded to comes near the end of the book, and frankly was so surprising to me that I felt a real jolt when I read it: It was as if, after spending most of its time on earth as a chair, my desk seat had reared up and demanded a bowl of ice cream and a massage in flawless Scottish brogue.

Which leads me to our main character, Edie. She is an environmentalist extremist who, after a long siege trying to prevent logging in old-growth forest, is badly damaged in a fall. She's never particularly well framed for me, always seeming like one of those actors just slightly out of frame in a student film, the one you irritatedly crane your neck to get a bead on, resulting in no bead and a sore neck. Her tragedies begin early, in her affluent religious-nut family, and never seem to let up for an instant. Her own part in making them worse is, to me, inscrutable. I don't understand why she starts doing the rotten things she does at all. But once launched down that road, I see clearly that her final act in California, the one that drives her into the arms of a coyote and to Florida, is tragic in the original meaning: Inevitable, born of her flaw.

Her quiet life in Florida is such a contrast...such a complete overhaul...that I scratched all my exposed parts trying to figure it out. Her dark moments in Florida, the meanness and cruel, biting judgment she shows, are simply loftily ignored by her Floridian family. Nothing comes of them, nothing is made of them, and they fly up to the ceiling, there to hover over the story like birds crapping on what takes place, but without comment from the crapped-upon.

But in the end, despite a new and ghastly set of crimes designed to solve several problems at once, the novel delivers on the promise it's made to us from the start: The gospel of forgiveness, of fresh starts and new beginnings, is indeed a green promise...have the guts to reach for it, it'll be yours and only yours. Very, very solid storytelling. I recommend buyng the book ASAP. ( )