A Smile Shy

At Big Bass Lake and Mobile Homes, a development "planted in the hill and abandoned like a crop gone bad," whiskey-soaked Weezal Peterson has worked hard to forget his past-and largely succeeded. Over the course of the story, several intertwining narratives-including a young woman's search for a husband after being accused of murdering the previous two; the meteoric rise of a colonial-era ink company; and the wavering convictions of a failed writer and farmer who expresses his despair by cooking fragrant meatballs-come crashing together in a rural Pennsylvania trailer park. In the conflagration, Weezal's history, and his future, are revealed to both the reader and to Weezal himself. Smart and sweet, poetic and wild-and delectably raunchy-A Smile Shy spares us none of the details of these characters' sorrows and horrors: poverty and addiction, loneliness and domestic violence. And yet every page is infused with both a crackling humor and an immense tenderness.