A crooked tree A novel

A single mom, a car full of preteens and teenagers. After a long day, one kid in particular, 12-year-old Ellen, gets on Mom's last nerve. A few miles from home, she stops the car and kicks Ellen out. "You can walk the rest of the way." Hours pass, and no Ellen. When she does arrive home, she's cut, bruised, bloody, and shaken. She's been picked up by a strange man and escaped what surely would have been a sexual assault or worse by jumping from the car. Her sister Libby, 15, tends to Ellen's wounds, protects her secrets, and enlists her gang of high school pals to track the attacker and seek revenge. In the process, Libby learns hard lessons about loyalty and friendship, the delicate boundaries between private and public lives, and the trustworthiness of family bonds. With its adolescent characters who apply teenage logic to adult problem-solving, Mannion's coming-of-age debut verges on being a YA novel. Probing, empathic and intense, the action capably mines the numerous uncertainties teens face when coping with situations that test their independence.

An Irish American family unravels in Mannion's atmospheric if overstuffed debut, set in rural Valley Forge, Pa., in the early 1980s. A fight among pensive 15-year-old narrator Libby Gallagher's four siblings escalates on the long drive home from school at the mention of their estranged father's recent death, leading their mother to order 12-year-old Ellen out of the car. Ellen walks for miles along the desolate highway, and when she returns in the middle of the night, dirt and blood smeared across her face, she tells Libby she'd hitched a ride from a "creepy" man and jumped out of the moving car after he molested her. Soon, a friend assembles a gang to hunt down and beat Ellen's attacker, whom Ellen calls Barbie Man for his long white hair. But Ellen had told Barbie Man where she lives, and Libby fears he might come for them. Meanwhile, amid nostalgic memories of their father and a series of unremarkable high school coming-of-age scenes, moments of the girls' discomfort and scenes of sexual abuse give the book a prevailing sense of foreboding around other adult men. The novel builds suspense with additional sightings of Barbie Man, but it culminates in an implausible denouement with too many questions left unanswered. Mannion writes skillfully but fails to unify a hodgepodge plot. (Jan.)This review has been updated.