Welcome to Elmwood Springs, Missouri the fictional setting of Fannie Flagg’s long-awaited novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl. As near perfect as you can get without having to get downright sentimental about it or making up a bunch of lies, this neighborly town is filled with charming, quirky characters and has a strong, endearing sense of community.

Dena Nordstrom—otherwise known lovingly as Baby Girl—is the surprisingly well-adjusted daughter of Norma and Macky Nordstrom. And though Dena has left Elmwood Springs to become a TV anchorwoman and the pride and joy of her network, her hometown is still an intrinsic part of her, and she of it. With a future full of promise, Dena survives her complicated present and her mysterious past, all of which are tied to Elmwood Springs.

Flagg, an Alabama native, has, time and again, proven her mastery of storytelling, her ability to make each character vivid and real. Welcome to the World is no different. With an expert ear for language, Flagg, through her narrator, lovingly invites us to be a part of this community that is Elmwood Springs, this community with bounds far more reaching than any map could measure.

Much of this novel is vintage Flagg. For instance, Aunt Elner blesses Dena’s heart from afar over the fact that she eats in restaurants day and night up in New York City. Mourning the lack of anything homemade in Dena’s diet, Aunt Elner decides to make use of her stockpile of hickory nuts and send her my hickory nut cake with the caramel icing. There are no hidden symbols in this cake, no hidden answer to a mystery. This and other examples have little or no bearing on the plot at all. These entertaining asides, however, are ultimately the essence of Flagg’s novel.

Through unmistakable voices and rich ties to home, Welcome to the World illustrates how much a part of a person place can be. You can take the baby girl out of Elmwood Springs, but you can’t take Elmwood Springs out of the baby girl.

Pat Patrick is a reviewer in Nashville.

Although Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots, has been dead since 1992, works bearing his name continue to surface, capitalizing on the momentum generated by the soaring best-selling 1977 family epic which sold millions of copies. The posthumous canon of Haley resumed in 1993 with the more modest success of his last novel, Queen, the tale of the writer’s paternal great-grandmother that produced a notable three-episode TV miniseries. Now, screenwriter David Stevens, who wrote Queen from the research notes and tapes of Haley, reprises his role as the late novelist’s collaborator with their new offering, Mama Flora’s Family, the fictional saga of the gutsy matriarch of a clan of poor black Arkansas sharecroppers.

The latest Haley-Stevens effort avoids the criticisms that surrounded Queen and the Roots phenomenon by sticking with a big multigenerational story touching on all of the large themes common to their work: familial love, persistence, courage, racism, temptation, and religious faith. Stevens, drawing on his formidable ability as a storyteller, spends ample time with the strong yet flawed Mama Flora, whose determination to survive in a brutal Jim Crow South quickly earns our respect. Following the murder of her husband Booker, she overcomes the deep sorrow from his death through hard work and prayer. Nothing will stop her from achieving a better life for her son, Willie, and her sister Josie’s child, Ruthana, adopted after the woman’s tragic death.

Stevens skillfully transforms the central story from the usual traditional, long-suffering Big Mama variety into a classic metaphor for the harsh emotional and psychological costs of the Great Migration confronting African Americans fleeing the South. It is the battle of Willie, attempting to adapt to fast Chicago life, that spells out the high price of assimilating into a new, hostile world. But he stubbornly survives and becomes a man. Like many blacks, he signs up to fight in the segregated military during World War II to prove something to a country that still denied equal rights to all. Maybe patriotism could change that, he thinks but it does not, as Stevens painfully reveals.

If the author etches accurate portrayals of Flora and Willie, the leading characters, through the depressed 1930s, zoot suit 1940s, and Eisenhower 1950s, he then reaches full stride in his astute characterization of the politicized Ruthana in the militant Black Power days of the 1960s and 1970s. Although she bucks the home-spun values of Mama Flora, searching for a self-affirming existence, the young woman keeps the bed-rock truths of family and tradition close to her heart unlike others in the clan who succumb to drugs and other temptations.

There is nothing fancy about the narrative that drives this sprawling family yarn, but the people and events will stay with the reader long after the last page is read. With Mama Flora’s Family listed as Haley’s final work, his literary legacy, rich with accomplishments, concludes on a respectable, competent note.

Robert Fleming is a writer in New York.

I had a roommate in college who used to leave guests doubled over on the floor with a hilarious cultural critique of what he deemed the eight basic plot lines of the Family Circus comic strip. All those laughs came rushing back in sinister spades while reading J. Robert Lennon’s slightly wacky, partly dark, but often charming second novel The Funnies. Lennon has imagined the life of characters in Family Follies, a thinly veiled Family Circus. Rather than the placid, domestic space of a cartoon where inevitably the dog does something cute and everyone get along, Lennon has embodied his fictional family with phobias, neuroses, bitter sibling rivalries, and eerie family secrets all doused in a generous splash of alcohol. But from this veritable cornucopia of 1990s dysfunction comes a rather winning novel, one as equal on laughs as it is on probing steadiness.

The protagonist and voice of the novel is Tim Mix, the second son of five children, who inherits the Family Follies strip from his now-dead father, Carl (he dies in the first line of the book). While loved by countless millions across the country, Carl was not the portrait of goodness portrayed in the strip, and his real family bears little resemblance to the idealized cartoon. The bulk of the novel traces Tim’s transformation from naifish conceptual artist to a bona fide cartoonist. It doesn’t always go well. As he moves back into his boyhood house, Tim not only fights family demons, but also has to worry about Ken Dorn, a rival cartoonist who wants the Family Follies strip so badly he often stalks Tim, much like Claire Quilty in Nabokov’s Lolita. Lennon’s voice is easy-going, and the narrative clips along nicely, often effectively using underlying familial tension as a type of unseen or understated character. Tim’s siblings are interesting and well drawn, especially Pierce, the 28-year-old paranoid who never moved out of his parent’s home. Not as successful, however, is the figure of Dot Mix, the mother, now in a nursing home in the shroud of alcohol-induced senility. Pierce and Tim’s desire to get her out of the home doesn’t necessarily add to the more successful, detailed, and dynamic relationships in the book. But this relationship, as well as a sometimes disjointed last third of the book, does not ruin an otherwise excellent novel. Lennon has tremendous skills of description, providing the right amount of detail without becoming obsessive. His obviously thorough research into the business and culture of comic strips pays superb dividends as Tim attends a comic strip convention in one of the book’s more memorable and funny chapters. The Funnies may not always be funny, but Lennon’s balanced delivery, his inherent whimsy, and his refusal to brush the darker aspects of the book under the rug gives The Funnies its impressive energy and nuanced psychological strength.

Mark Luce is a writer in Lawrence, Kansas.

The longing to own a house by the side of the road is one of the oldest of humanity’s stories. Perhaps for this reason it also functions as subtext in much of our literature, and now provides the momentum for Andre Dubus III’s outstanding new novel, House of Sand and Fog.

"In my country, there is an old belief that if a bird flies into your home, it is an angel who has come to guide you . . ."

The speaker here is Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, now owner of a bungalow on a California hillside. But that’s no angel in his house — she’s Kathy Nicolo, a recovering addict, who believes that the Colonel’s bungalow rightfully belongs to her. Actually, through an error at the county tax office, she’s right. But the Colonel, who bought the house legally at auction, is also right. Each side of the ensuing property dispute sees the other through the lens of its own culture.

Americans, the Colonel thinks, spend far too much time in the "pale blue glow" of television, and thus ". . . have eyes of very small children who are forever looking for their next source of distraction, entertainment, or a sweet taste in the mouth." To Kathy and her deputy sheriff boyfriend, the Colonel’s proud and graceful Iranian family, though U.S. citizens, are "Arabs" too far from home, "sitting on stolen property."

One of the many strengths of this story is that most of its characters come to understand the point of view of the others at least briefly. But each, through circumstance, personality, and culture, is locked into a pattern of behavior which he or she is helpless to change. Dubus’s ability to inhabit characters across culture and gender is stunning.

What’s at stake here, Dubus suggests, is far more than property. As this collision of cultures and good intentions gone wrong spirals into tragedy, there’s a sense of inevitability like that at the end of an ancient Greek play. In our grieving for the fates of these people, we recognize ourselves, our dreams and flaws, as well as those of our own culture.

James William Brown is the author of Blood Dance (Harcourt Brace).

Fans of Gail Godwin have cause for celebration with the publication of her new novel, Evensong, the sequel to her bestseller, Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1990).

When readers left Margaret Gower, she had applied to seminary and was planning a career in the clergy, like her beloved father. In Godwin’s sequel, Margaret has realized her dream and is serving as rector of All Saints High Balsam Episcopal Church located in the Highlands area of western North Carolina. Her husband and fellow priest Adrian Bonner is the acting headmaster at a private school for disaffected teenagers.

Evensong chronicles the events of Advent, 1999 that season of spiritual expectation in the Church calendar beginning on the last Sunday in November and lasting until Christmas. At the close of the millennium, High Balsam, a town that claims to be four thousand feet above the cares of the world, has more than its share of problems. Residents are worried about a recent shooting which has heightened tensions between the year-round locals and the wealthy people of property who spend their summers in the mountain resort town.

Unemployment has further heightened the extremes of have and have-not, and the young pastor finds her formerly peaceful parish in turmoil. Add to this upheaval the arrival of three newcomers to High Balsam, and Pastor Margaret’s life becomes more complicated than she can handle.

In Evensong, Gail Godwin chronicles the collision course of conflicting economic, social, and spiritual interests which confront High Balsam (and America) at the dawn of the third millennium. She writes with characteristic compassion and insight about the complexities of family ( an inextricable knot of messes and blessings ) and the mysteries of faith (how redemptive people can come to us in the unlikeliest of shapes ). And, she brings to maturity one of her most enduring characters: Margaret Gower Bonner, a woman who, like her father, lived by the grace of daily obligation. Linda Shull writes a column for The Leader in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Those who know Jim Harrison’s fiction, poetry, and essays discuss the work with awe; those unfamiliar with his name light up when informed that he wrote the novella basis for the film Legends of the Fall. In his seventh novel, The Road Home, Harrison provides a spirited study of human nature, an epic bound by insight and love. Speaking in the distinct voices of four individuals, all related by blood, marriage, and deep loyalties, Harrison delivers a textured questioning of life’s headlong direction, its what-might-have-been sidetracks, its motives and mysteries and, finally, its finality.

Set primarily in remote Nebraska farm and range land over the past hundred years, The Road Home chronicles the spectrum of emotions, the events of lifetimes. We observe friendships built upon moments of insight, alliances of coincidence and happenstance. Expanding on characters from his intriguing 1988 novel, Dalva (we hesitate to call The Road Home a sequel; its action both precedes and follows that in Dalva), Harrison also explores the attitudes of the region and the several eras that frame the narrative. His independent people tend close to the land, understand survival in the face of weather and isolation indeed, the family patriarch is half-Lakota and yet are drawn to the world at large by world war, legal dealings, and quests of the heart. In vignettes tough and poignant, humorous and mystic, impulsive then melancholy, the tale becomes mythology for the millennium, solid food for modern thought, as encouragement to claim soulful value from our days in this world.

This is not to imply that The Road Home is difficult reading. This mansion is built of small bricks. Yet Harrison’s sense of language, of idiom, makes the printed page three-, and often four-, dimensional. His sentences are blends of fact and philosophy; many paragraphs voyage across a lifetime. The simplicity of the tale offers majesty. These people worry about war profiteering and, in the same breath, discuss bird sightings. As the narrators provide plaintive momentum, their surroundings set an almost-bare stage for perceptions and memories. The reader is gathered along by their acceptance of both wealth and poverty, their inclination to roll with life’s ups and downs, struggles with common sense, and with what cannot be changed.

In the end we see how men and women build personal value systems, cope with heartache and joy, survive bewildering day-to-day fortune, interact both with humans and their natural surroundings. At one point in The Road Home, Harrison wonders if humans are, in pure geologic terms, as inconsequential as rocks on the beach. On that level, this novel is plain beauty; in real time our lives at this moment The Road Home is a rush of sensitivity and depth.

Over 35 years Jim Harrison has created six other novels, a half-dozen volumes of poetry, three novella trilogies, and an anthology of essays. This novel will satisfy Harrison’s deserved audience; it will, without question, expand his audience.

Tom Corcoran lives in Florida. His debut mystery, The Mango Opera was published this year by St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books.

Pam Houston, best-selling author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, returns to the subject of relationships in her captivating new book, Waltzing the Cat. This time, her heroine is Lucy O’Rourke, a bright, successful landscape photographer in her early thirties, whose life, nonetheless, seems like one false start after another, way too much up and down to keep winding up at the very same place. More often than not, that place is an unsatisfying relationship. Convinced that anybody is better than nobody, Lucy takes up with a string of men bound to hurt and disappoint her. In these 11 intertwined and insightful stories, we meet Gordon, the lover turned stalker with a jealous streak as vicious as a heat seeking missile; blond, beautiful Carter, who is so physically and emotionally distant that Lucy dubs their relationship virtual love; and Erik, a brilliant Norwegian with a penchant for blowing things up, who keeps it together to the tune of a fifth and half of tequila a day. Indeed, wherever Lucy goes, trouble seems to follow. An inveterate thrill seeker, she endures a hair-raising descent over the vortex of rapids in Cataract Canyon, a freak attack by a grand cayman in the Amazon, and a hurricane in the Gulf Stream. Houston’s knowledge of rivers and fine sense of storytelling make these accounts riveting.

For all her misadventures, Lucy is a strong woman with a deep desire to change her life. In Moving from One Body of Water to Another, a chance meeting with Carlos Castenada in LAX gives her the strength to return to her beloved Rocky Mountains, to Hope, Colorado, and a ranch that is gently slipping into the Rio Grande River. In Hope, Lucy finds a place that could forgive you all your years of expectations, a place that could allow you in time to forgive yourself. Here, at last, was a home where the dirt feels like goodness under your feet. Slowly, with the help of wise women friends, Lucy begins to break out of her old patterns and make a new life. Readers will cheer for her as they would for a friend as she discovers, at last, how to trust in herself and all she has to offer the world. It’s easy to believe being alone is the strong thing, says Lucy finally, but the river taught me long ago that it’s a stronger thing still to make yourself fragile. To say I love you, I dare you, I want you with me. Choices can’t be good or bad, a friend tells Lucy early on. There is only the event and the lessons learned from it. In Waltzing the Cat, Pam Houston teaches us that hope and redemption are always possible and sometimes found in the most unlikely places.

Beth Duris is a writer for The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.