Spark

At the age of 14, Andrea’s brother, Delphie, burned down a shed, an event that their mother calls “the beginning of the end.” Two years later he torched a house, killing a family. As the book begins, Delphie, after 20 years in prison, moves in with his sister and her boyfriend in their small Brooklyn apartment, reawakening Andrea’s guilt over her brother’s actions and spurring her into the streets at night. In a late-night record store, Andrea meets a “[s]keletal and beautiful” woman, Sally, who takes her to a mysterious bar that she won’t be able to find again. Sally’s function in the novel is unclear, as is the function of Andrea’s dog-walking client, a plucky aging actress named Rain. Andrea’s guilt has to do with a fact of her birth that becomes clear late in the book, and which ties her to her brother in more ways than one. Unfortunately, this debut is as cluttered as the junk drawer where Delphie’s mother kept the matchbooks, with too many elements—the boyfriend, the brother, the brother’s psychiatrist, the client, and the friend, all of them given plenty of attention—for the reader to feel the burn of Andrea’s anguish. (Sept.)