This third novel by Michigan author Kasischke (Suspicious River) opens with a shocking scene from a Columbine-like school massacre. Diana and her best friend are confronted by a schoolmate killer, but only Diana is spared. Fast-forward 20 years: Diana, now middle-aged and still beautiful, is a housewife and artist living in the same idyllic university town with a handsome professor-husband and a young daughter. She has seemingly repressed her memory of the event as well as her survivor's guilt, but her perfect world and her grip on reality are both starting to crack. These scenes are imbued with that sense of eerie apprehension found in a good horror flick. Woven through the book is a flashback narrative of Diana's sunny but empty-headed adolescent days. The novel plays teenage Diana's youthful illusions of immortality and beauty against the shifting, uneasy reality of middle age. Kasischke, also a published poet, writes prose that is dreamy and lyrical. This is one book you won't want to put down. Highly recommended for all popular fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/01.] Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Acclaimed poet Kasischke applies her lyrical skills to fiction in this double portrait of Diana McPhee as 40-year-old wife and mother and 17-year-old girl. As in her earlier novels (White Bird in a Blizzard and Suspicious River), here Kasischke's precise imagery and the languid, dreamy pace capture the poignancy and sluggish awakening of late adolescence, though they are at odds with the harsh tale that unfolds. Blond Diana and dark Maureen, regarding their images in the high school bathroom mirror, jolt from their teenage dreams at the sound of gunfire. Their attacker is fellow student Michael Patrick, who laughs as he delivers a horrible ultimatum: one girl will live and one will die; each has a moment to choose. Maureen offers herself, and the sacrifice is accepted or so it seems. As the past begins to contaminate Diana's safe suburban life with her beautiful daughter and loving husband, it becomes clear that this future is the result of her imagination constructing a life she may never live in the moments before Patrick releases the safety on his gun. Kasischke is at her best writing about young women urgently sexual, childishly careless. This song of innocence and of experience reads like a fairy tale gone drastically wrong, the sensibility heightened by Kasischke's emphasis on language. Despite the poignancy of the central moral conflict (her or me?), its resolution is made secondary to the novel's stylistic imperatives and, as a result, the story loses much of its power. Still, it will please readers who were mesmerized by The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and other tales of teenage reverie. 10-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kasischke (White Bird in a Blizzard, 1998, etc.) uses the random high-school massacres of the last few years as a taking-off point to compare the life of a typical teenaged girl with the adult self she becomes-or imagines she will. In a high school in 2000, a boy on a shooting spree barges into the girls' lavatory, where he presents the two friends inside with a choice of biblical proportion: Which girl should he kill? Born-again Maureen offers herself to save her best friend Diana while Diana hears herself ask him to shoot Maureen and let her live. From this moment, the story travels in time, back to the previous months when Diana and Maureen cemented their friendship and then forward to Diana's idyllic future 20 years later. Married to a philosophy professor, living in a charming house with rockers on the front porch, and raising a lovable blond daughter, the grown-up Diana and her life are oddly bland-until, that is, the ominous pinpricks of darkness begin to accumulate rapidly: a cat resembling her own dead one appears suddenly in the kitchen; her daughter's teacher suspects her of bad parenting; teenagers have sex in the neighbor's pool; she sees her husband walking down the street with a pretty student whose hand lies provocatively in his back pocket. Is Diana's life unraveling because of her guilt at sacrificing Maureen in order to survive? Or is Diana correct that her past has started "to bleed into the present"? As the adult Diana's life becomes a nightmare, her teenaged self continues in a happily mindless drift-watching TV, flirting with boys, hanging out with Maureen-until the two selves converge with horrific violence. Unfortunately, there is a generic, overmanaged quality to Diana's life as both teenager and woman. Although it packs a scary wallop, the novel is ultimately too self-conscious and contrived to be truly moving. Ambitious, flawed, disturbing. Author tour

Disturbing fiction (Suspicious River, 1996, and White Bird in a Blizzard, 1999) is fast becoming prizewinning poet Kasischke's hallmark. Her third novel opens with a haunting scene set in the girls' washroom of a high school. Diana is goofing in front of the mirror with her best friend, Maureen, "when they hear the first dot-dot-dot of automatic gunfire. It sounds phony and far away." They are eventually confronted by the gunman, a fellow classmate whom "they'd never even really noticed." He asks them a terrible question, "Which one of you girls should I kill?" Kasischke then juxtaposes scenes from 17-year-old Diana's life with scenes from her apparent future as a 40-year-old wife and mother. In the final chapter, however, the author ambushes the reader with a shocking revelation about Diana's fate. Whether the novel is viewed as a cheap narrative trick (there will be plenty of readers crying foul) or an imaginative exploration, there's no denying that Kasischke is a fearless writer. --Joanne Wilkinson