Licking Our Wounds

A fresh, engagingly sarcastic and determinedly bawdy voice goes a long way toward giving dimensionality to a tale about recovering from lost love. After her lover leaves her, Maria, a compulsively candid lesbian living in contemporary Los Angeles, begins to come to terms with the havoc wreaked on her family, and her emotional life, by the death of her older brother in Vietnam. Unable to reconcile with her lover's sudden departure, and obsessing over the subsequent loss of her sex drive, Maria traces a path from her childhood to the present, revealing a family torn apart by grief and illuminating the emergence of her own sexuality. Moving back and forth from her Michigan childhood to the present, Maria speaks frankly and graphically, with a good deal of humor, about her sexual coming-of-age. She calls her vagina ""Mona"" and envisions Mona, the materialization of her AWOL sex drive, embarking on a number of adventures-from scooting through the countryside to appearing on Oprah. Many of the other characters, however, from Maria's New Age lesbian friend Christie, to her troubled younger brother Fitz, are thinly drawn and saddled with simplistic motivations. But if her plot flirts with sentimentality, D'Haene, in her debut, always comes back down to earth. She's blessed with a savvy, iconoclastic view of the world that is mordant but never mean. (Mar.)