Choose your partner

By Diane White  |  November 9, 2008

KISSING GAMES OF THE WORLD
By Sandi Kahn Shelton
Shaye Areheart, 400 pp., $23

TIME OF MY LIFE
By Allison Winn Scotch
Shaye Areheart, 304 pp., $23

THANK YOU FOR ALL THINGS
By Sandra Kring
Bantam, 448 pp.,paperback, $12

The first of these three novels is a romance, but it also draws on the difficulties of father-son relationships. The second is a fantasy that plays on the question "What if?" The third is a remarkably well-written family novel with a precocious 11-year-old narrator.

Sandi Kahn Shelton's "Kissing Games of the World" has the shape of a classic romance, in which opposites at first repel, then attract, and after many ups and downs find love. It's been done countless times, but rarely as engagingly as Shelton does it in this novel, her third.

Jamie McClintock, a young artist and single mother, lives with 60-ish Harris Goddard in his Chester, Conn., farmhouse, along with two 5-year-olds, Jamie's son, Arley, and Harris's grandson Christopher. Jamie's and Harris's relationship is platonic, although the town gossips believe otherwise. Harris has a reputation as a ladies' man. He stepped out on his wife, Maggie, and eventually walked out altogether, abandoning her and their son, Nate.

Harris has a heart attack and dies, naked, sprawled on Jamie's bed. It's innocent, but no one believes it, especially Nate, who has been estranged from his father for years. After Nate's wife died in an auto accident he turned over Christopher to Harris, who discouraged his son from visiting. Nate lives in Los Angeles and works as a salesman, a job that keeps him traveling much of the time. He wants to sell the farmhouse as quickly as possible and take Christopher with him on the road, an unrealistic plan further complicated by the fact that Christopher hates his father and wants to stay with Jamie and Arley. Jamie is faced with the loss of her home and a little boy she loves. Shelton tosses in some strong minor characters, including Jamie's feckless sister and Nate's manipulative boss. Romance novels often require the hero, especially, to change dramatically, and unrealistically. Shelton is such a good writer that she manages to make Nate's transformation seem believable.

Allison Winn Scotch dusts off that old literary device time travel and uses it to crank up the plot of her second novel, "Time of My Life." When young mother Jillian Westfield hears that her former boyfriend Jackson is about to be married, simmering doubts about her own marriage come to a boil. What if she'd married Jackson, the easygoing magazine editor and aspiring novelist, instead of Henry the workaholic investment banker? Given recent events, Jillian's privileged life in a posh Connecticut suburb has the flavor of a time warp even before she blasts seven years into the past and wakes up single in July 2000. If this really were science fiction instead of high-concept chick lit, Jillian might spend the rest of the novel running around like Kevin McCarthy in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," fruitlessly warning all and sundry about Osama bin Laden. But Jillian, who narrates her story in the present tense, has other things on her mind, chief among them yearning for her 18-month-old daughter, Katie. Of course Jillian has time-traveled back to the year 2000, and Katie hasn't been born yet, but what if somehow, somewhere, in some parallel universe her adored baby girl is waiting for her?

Jillian knows how it feels to be abandoned. Her mother deserted her, her brother, and their father when Jillian was 9 years old. Now, after 18 years without a word, her mother has sent a letter, asking if they can meet. Can Jillian bring herself to reconnect with her runaway mother? Will Jackson propose? Will Jillian bring in the Coca-Cola account for her ad agency? And where is Henry? Jillian's situation may be implausible, but the character Scotch has created is easy to understand, a woman trying to figure out who she is and what she wants to do with her life. Scotch is a fluent, spirited writer, but she can be careless, as when she refers repeatedly to Jillian's male massage therapist, a key character, as a "masseuse." That may seem like nitpicking, but readers do care about language.

Eleven-year-old Lucy McGowan wants to be a psychologist. She's "people smart," in contrast to her twin brother, Milo, a "scary-smart" genius with an IQ of 180 and none of his sister's intuition about the ways in which people think and behave. Lucy is the principal narrator of Sandra Kring's third novel, "Thank You for All Things," an intelligent, involving story about a family haunted by violence, physical and emotional.

Lucy and Milo live in Chicago with their mother, Tess, who scrapes out a living writing Christian romance novels even though, as the irreverent Lucy notes, "she's an atheist who happens to be bitter about love." The bitterness is the legacy of her family history as well as her relationship with the twins' father. His identity is a mystery, a secret that Tess refuses to reveal to her children. Tess's mother, Lillian, insists that her daughter and the children accompany her to Timber Falls, Wis., to help care for her former husband, Tess's father, who is dying. She tells Tess that he wants to leave his house and land to her, which Tess refuses to believe. Father and daughter have been bitterly estranged for years. In Timber Falls, Lucy forges a relationship with her grandfather, now enfeebled by strokes, no longer the hate-filled, abusive man he used to be. She digs into the family's past, trying to understand her grandfather and searching for clues that will reveal her own father's identity. In the process she unearths some ugly truths, and learns about love and the power of forgiveness.

Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.