TOMATO GIRL

By Jayne Pupek (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 298 pages, $23.95)

After reading "Tomato Girl," I wanted to call my parents and say: Dad, thanks for not sedating Mom with tranquilizer shots meant for horses. Mom, thanks for never asking me to comfort a dead baby preserved in a jar.

Pupek's writing smacks the senses, and her characters seep with pain.

Her novel paints Ellie Sanders' tangled world, and to step inside is to immediately feel the knots in her stomach. Ellie's mama is mentally ill and pregnant. Ellie and her weary daddy are ever-vigilant against the paralyzing moods. Mama doesn't make sense. She stares. She scratches herself until she bleeds. Ellie, just 11, watches with confusion and guilt as her daddy turns away from his family toward Tess -- a bedeviled teen who grows tomatoes and wears bright lipstick and honeysuckle perfume. At first she fascinates Ellie, with her big-girl smarts about men and makeup and kissing. But fascination turns to nausea as the Tomato Girl replaces Ellie's mama in the household and in Ellie's daddy's bed. Theirs is a world of incest, drugs, seizures, blood and guns and madness -- and secrets too heavy and gruesome for a little girl to bear alone.

"This was all too hard for me, trying to keep Mama calm, doing what Daddy wanted, not stirring up trouble with Tess," Ellie says. "I felt like a bandage being stretched to cover too many places at once."

As dark as the story is, even the villains stir empathy.

Readers may weep for Ellie and scream at her nightmares, but they'll probably feel the knots of her tormentors' lives, too.

HOLLY COLLIER, NEWS COPY EDITOR


The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

By Tim Tzouliadis (Penguin Press, 436 pages, $29.95)

It's impossible not to weep after reading this book. In 1931, at the height of the Depression, Moscow placed ads in U.S. newspapers seeking 6,000 engineers and skilled workers to help Soviet industry. More than 100,000 Americans responded. This is the wrenchingly sad story of what happened to the several thousand who went to the U.S.S.R. -- there is no precise figure -- and who subsequently vanished in the Terror. Their stories are heartbreaking.

As Tim Tzouliadis shows in this meticulously documented account, most were ordinary men and women who simply sought better lives in a country that was portrayed as a utopia in most U.S. media. When the dream became a nightmare, they were abandoned by their country. This book fills a significant void in the history of U.S.-Soviet relations, as well as the American left. It is shocking.

MICHAEL J. BONAFIELD, NEWS COPY EDITOR