IRON SHOES

Award-winning storywriter Giles (Creek Walk, 1997, etc.) shows that she can extend her gift to the longer form, in an edgy debut novel.

We first meet 40-something part-time librarian Kay Sorenson when she’s visiting her mother Ida in the hospital following a second leg amputation. Sounds dismal, but Ida, glamorous and larger-than-life even without her legs, is as brave and funny as she is difficult. Kay is dutiful yet wary, and with good reason: Ida’s illnesses have been the defining ritual of Kay’s life. Ida has been falling and breaking bones since Kay was born, a pregnancy, Ida later reveals to Kay, she tried to abort. Nevertheless, Kay has stuck close to home, so eclipsed by her mother’s histrionics and her father’s inscrutability, and so uncertain she and her brother, Victor, were ever truly loved, that she can barely acknowledge her own arrested development. Kay’s romance with the mythology of her parents’ cracked devotion to each other makes her life with her son Nicky and health-obsessed husband Neal, whose best shot at comfort is a stingy, “Oh, babe,” seem as warm and safe as an empty bank vault. So, to stave off the encroaching chill, and to delay her inevitable reckoning with the truth, Kay, like her mother and father, cracks jokes and drinks. Paradoxically, as the story unfolds, alcohol will serve everyone as both the potion of illusion and, after Ida dies from cancer, of clarity. The magic of this tale lies in Giles’s exquisite prose (a scent, a sound on every page without strain), her willingness to lay bare her characters’ warts with equal parts of mordant humor and affection, and in dialogue that sounds overheard instead of created.

While Kay’s midlife dilemma is not uncommon, Giles’s handling of this endearing heroine’s shucking off her “iron shoes” to navigate the terrain of a new life is an uncommon beauty.