cover image The Girl from Charnelle

The Girl from Charnelle

K. L. Cook, . . Morrow, $24.95 (374pp) ISBN 978-0-06-082965-0

For his first novel, Cook revisits the Tate family of Charnelle, Tex., a panhandle town, from his collection of linked short stories, Last Call . The year is 1960, and Laura Tate, just 16, has kept house for her three brothers and father ever since her momma walked out the year before. When a married man—John Letig, her father's workmate from Charnelle Steel & Construction—kisses her on New Year's Eve, Laura, long uninterested in the show-off antics of her pimple-faced peers, later catches herself daydreaming. After much indecision, they consummate their flirtation. The author closely observes the affair: the physical pain of Laura's sexual initiation, the power shift between them once Laura understands her allure, the irresistible pull of desire, despite their foundering relationship. Readers of Last Call will supply details of setting, local mores and secondary characters in this novel. But those coming to Cook's Charnelle for the first time will find some of the context for the affair only sketched in—especially the potentially rich psychological undercurrent of a family abandoned by its wife and mother. Still, the climactic confrontation is a welcome narrative infusion. (Apr.)