cover image The Search for Kate Duval

The Search for Kate Duval

Page Edwards. Marion Boyars Publishers, $16.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7145-3000-0

With little buildup, Edwards (American Girl) dives into the relationship between Kate DuVal, a 19-year-old college student investigating her family's genealogy, and Graden Wells, the self-absorbed 45-year-old narrator of this slight and unbelievable novel. When the two of them meet in Colorado, they are both digging into family histories. Wells is selling off recently inherited property and contemplating whether suicide runs in the family; DuVal is traveling the country, writing stories about her ancestors. She also seems determined to repeat the tragic pasts of her foremothers, and even before taking up with Wells has a fling with a married laundromat owner. DuVal never seems even remotely real, and while Wells vaguely lauds her special qualities (""vivacious and naive, eager and unrestrained"" on one page, ""young, enthusiastic: child-like really"" the next) Edwards provides no real evidence. She is meant to be glamorous and mysterious but instead comes off as silly and selfish, particularly when Wells reveals that they sometimes neglected to use birth control because ""Kate said she could always tell when she was ovulating by a little stinging feeling or something in her side."" The writing is basically competent, if sometimes torrid, but ultimately, what could have been a serious novel about the collision of problematic family histories is really a facile middle-aged fantasy. (Sept.)