Little Beauties

July 11, 2005
Two women a generation apart meet and work to overcome their hurt in this flawed but sympathetic first novel from Addonizio, a poet (Tell Me
) and short story writer (In the Box Called Pleasure
). In L.A.'s Long Beach, 34-year-old Diana McBride is working her latest dead-end job, at the children's store Teddy's World, when very young mother-to-be Jamie Ramirez comes in and buys a bear, but ends up burying it at the beach, along with her frustrations at impending kicked-out-of-the-house single motherhood. Addonizio alternates perspectives chapter-by-chapter, switching from Diana to Jamie to Jamie's unborn child, Stella ("I chose you, Stella tells her. I'm not going to let you just hand me over to somebody else"). The awkward results feel like a first-time novelist's cop-out on multiple characters. Addonizio has a great ear for what the OCD-afflicted Diana and the deluded, late-adolescent Jamie say to themselves, but the means by which Jamie ends up at Diana's apartment, along with Great Guy Anthony who has come to Jamie's roadside aid, feel contrived. After some trouble, strife and a serious scare with newborn Stella, things work out with a heartwarming complexity, but Addonizio hasn't fashioned a strong enough container for her characters' powerful feelings. Agent, Robert McQuilkin
.

June 15, 2005
Diana McBride works in a baby store called Teddy's World. She doesn't like babies, her husband has just left her, and she's an obsessive-compulsive washer. Into Teddy's World walks Jamie, a pregnant and depressed 17-year-old who has promised her New Age mother that she will give up her baby for adoption. Also present (but not visible) is Stella, Jamie's unborn child, whose views on Jamie are all-loving but realistic. When Jamie gives birth to Stella in the back of a stranger's Mercedes, everything changes -for everyone. Jamie decides to keep her baby, the stranger decides not to commit suicide, Stella decides that it was a bad idea to be born, and Diana decides to take in Jamie and Stella, provided they follow her many rules of cleanliness. In her fiction debut, noted poet Addonizio ("Tell Me "was a National Book Award finalist) makes an impressive transition to prose, revealing a wonderful imagination as she describes the struggles of each character with both a touching reality and an edgy sense of humor. This is a funny story, but it's about more than comedic characters and bizarre twists of fate -it's about being born and reborn, dying and almost dying and wanting to die, and learning how to live life in between. Recommended for popular fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "4/15/05.] -Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2005
Addonizio writes with sultry candor about womanhood under duress in her celebrated poetry, collected most recently in " What Is This Thing Called Love? " (2004). She now extends her provocative inquiry with verve and creative license in her first novel. Diana loves her job at a Long Beach baby store, but she is beginning to detect the contamination that haunts her. A former child pageant star pushed mercilessly by her man-crazy, alcoholic mother, Diana is a compulsive washer. Her obsessive behavior has driven away her husband, and she can't imagine how she can possibly give shelter to Jamie, a 17-year-old unwed mother, and her newborn, Stella, who desperately need a place to stay because Jamie's mother insists that she give Stella up for adoption. Addonizio writes with mesmerizing realism about Diana's efforts to conquer her neurosis and Jaime's conflicted motherhood, then turns to tongue-in-cheek fantasy to convey Stella's predicament as an old soul trapped in an infant's helpless body. The result is a funny, insightful, and diverting tale of high anxiety, rocky mother-daughter relationships, and the tyranny of the body. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)