THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF ISOBEL ROUNDTREE

A debut novel of enormous and pugnacious charm in which the narrator—a ten-year-old girl living with her combative parents on a Kentucky-area hog farm—observes, absorbs, and surmounts the tearing needs and angers of adults, all with a cool savvy. The happy ending she should have—happens. It's 1963, and as Isobel and her father, Prince Roundtree, cringe in the TV's blue light, her mother, Clematis, the beautiful, redhaired, tantrum-flinging, would-be singer and dancer—who lived ``her own fast life in her head''—slams out again. The next time Isobel sees her mother is in ``Sin City,'' where she and Dad gaily go to see Clematis perform in a ``nightclub''—i.e., strip joint. Isobel (who sneaks in) notices that her mother's eyes, when she sees her child, and Dad's eyes both ``filled up with that lost-in- the-wilderness look.'' It's in Sin City that Isobel, lost, lands in the police station, and there meets the six-foot-three Emma Swallow, a vagrant at 29, with silvery eyes and picket teeth. Until Emma shows up at the hog farm (at Isobel's invitation), home is grim and sad; there's also Isobel's fear of a drifter—the ``cat man''—who hangs around asking for Clematis. But while Emma doesn't do stupendous magic when she takes over as housekeeper (she'd promised to turn a policewoman into a toad), she is clean, almost pretty sometimes; Dad is happier; and things are settling down— when back comes Mother. Before long there's a bombshell blowup, a near-suicide, fire, death, and, for Isobel, some special private knowledge about who she is. A small, happy pleasure in spiky regional diction, with a loamy humor as King suggests a child's world of rich colors and fevered fairy-tale giants, and moments when ``the world stopped while you took the picture.''