Thumbelina

The ingenuous, plainspoken voice of its eponymous 14-year-old narrator renders Koenig's debut a compulsively readable and often moving work. As the novel opens, Thumbelina--ironically named, at six feet tall, with thick glasses and ""yellow hair that looks like pee and hangs down into the back pockets of my jeans""--has just become an orphan, her unmarried mother, Angelica, having driven her car into a duck pond near their house in Tacoma, Wash. Thumbelina soon finds herself in a foster home where she meets a confidante, Myrna, streetwise and pregnant, who immediately identifies a complication Thumbelina is not yet aware of: Thumbelina is pregnant, too. ""A fish this stupid is a fish I got a soft spot for,"" Thumbelina, resolved to keep her baby, announces to the doctor. Rather than repeat eighth grade, the two teens decide to run away, moving in with Myrna's sister and briefly working as strippers. During the course of this account of nine months in her life, Thumbelina parcels out pieces of her past in sassy, gutsy prose: her love/hate relationship with Angelica and both mother and daughter's problems, with Angelica's abusive, possibly gay boyfriend, Lester. Using starkly evocative language and themes that will remind readers of the work of Dorothy Allison and Elizabeth Berg, Koenig builds narrative suspense in small increments. One never knows when the second shoe is going to drop on Thumbelina's head, but it does. As Thumbelina faces very adult concerns--the possibility of having contracted AIDS and the prospect of putting the ""fish"" up for adoption--readers will find themselves deeply affected by her heart-wrenching saga. Agent, Barbara Kouts. (Feb.)