cover image White Girls

White Girls

Lynn Lauber. Vintage Books USA, $9 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-73411-6

In this collection of related short fiction, Loretta Dardio grows up in a small Ohio town among married, middle-class white women, bored and cynical until she falls in love with a black teen and his warm, honest family. ``The omniscient narrator in the last few stories is as expertly presented as the bumbling adolescent rebel voice of the earlier ones,'' said PW. (Sept.)