Crooked Little Heart
Anne Lamott
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
<p>With the same brilliant combination of humor and warmth that marked <b>Operating Instructions</b> and <b>Bird by Bird</b>, her two bestselling works of nonfiction, Anne Lamott now gives us an exuberant richly absorbing portrait of a family for whom the joys and sorrows of everyday life are magnified under the glare of the unexpected.<br><br>The Fergusons make their home in a small California town where life is supposed to resemble paradise, but for thirteen-year-old Rosie (last seen in Lamott's beloved novel <b>Rosie</b>), reality is a bit harsher.  Her mother, a recovering alcoholic, is still beset by grief over the early death of her first husband.  Rosie's stepfather is a struggling writer plagued by doubts and hilarious paranoia. And Rosie, aching in the bloom of young womanhood and obsessed with tournament tennis, finds that her athletic gifts, initially a source of triumph, now place her in peril, as a shadowy man who stalks her from the bleachers seems to be developing...</br></br></p>