The Browser: "The Love We All Wait For"

THE LOVE WE ALL WAIT FOR

By Lee Doyle (Komenar Publishing, 286 pages, $24.95)

There was no Dorothy tapping her ruby-slippered feet and yearning for home at the end of this book, but when I closed it, that was the image that popped into my mind. Lee Doyle's debut novel is a classic growing-up story, one in which 17-year-old Sheila O'Connor learns what kind of love is worth appreciating. We follow Sheila through her senior year of high school, 1975 in Salinas Valley, Calif. Her father was killed years earlier in a car accident, and her mother is planning to remarry. Her older brother Josh joins the military and leaves home. Her sister Annie is too young to understand and remember their father. The reader feels Sheila's sense of isolation and helplessness as she helps her best friend through an abortion, loses her virginity and tries to adjust to her mother's marriage. It all gets to be too much, and Sheila flees under the pretense of visiting her brother at boot camp. The romance and adventure of the open road lose their attraction as she realizes being alone is not all it's cracked up to be. "I'd made it through Daddy's failures and misguided choices. Through the pain he had endured that I had mistaken as mine. Through the loss of all the people I had tried to love but had found my love wanting. The wanting I knew now had been their own. Still I had Annie. And Josh. And my mother."

Just another way of saying, "There's no place like home."

JUDY ROMANOWICH SMITH, NEWS DESIGNER

GREASY RIDER

By Greg Melville (Algonquin Paperbacks, 257 pages, $15.95)

With its kicky subtitle ("Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future") and wacky guy-road-trip kind of story line, I have to admit I expected a more entertaining read. For what is a road trip without strife, breakdowns, near-death experiences? And this one, sadly, went pretty smoothly. (There's a grease joke in there somewhere.) Greg Melville and his college buddy Iggy decide to drive from Vermont to California in a Mercedes station wagon that they have converted to run on vegetable oil. Well, not to give away the ending or anything, but they make it. With very few problems. They smell like a sizzling basket of fries as they tool across the country, and they bicker a few times, and Greg buys some stuff at Wal-Mart, which annoys his wife (who, back home, keeps close watch on the credit card bills), but that's about the extent of the drama.

To add to the gravitas of the journey and the book, Melville makes side expeditions to learn about solar power, wind power, and other serious and important renewable-energy sources. He's a good writer and probably a very fun guy, and he really tries his best to make this stuff interesting, but it just doesn't quite work. A few more flat tires, maybe, or an oil spill. ...

LAURIE HERTZEL, BOOKS EDITOR