Normal

The cover of Lucia Nevai's collection of short stories, Normal, is a simple silhouette of a perfect family, circa 1950s: man, woman, and child hold hands and stare off into a clip-art sunset. In the pages beneath this idyllic image, the concept of normal takes on new meaning. For the characters of Nevai's 12 tales, it is simply one more stop along the road, quite a ways past wildly dysfunctional but not so far from merely unhappy. Take the main character of "Belief." Young Maureen is a not-so-happy camper at Methodist camp. With her father in jail and her mother at a disconnected phone number, the little girl exercises the only control she has, cutting her own body over and over again with a Swiss army knife. In "Quinn's Wedding," the celebration of a marriage is somewhat dampened by the bride's addiction to cocaine and her father's history of incest with her sister.

Weddings, funerals, Thanksgiving meals--these are the battlefields on which Nevai's characters struggle to define themselves and to connect with the people they love most but most often do not understand. Nobody in Normal is normal, but Nevai makes sure everybody has some share of sympathy, wit, and dignity.