Author’s life in Lebanon infuses ‘A Girl Made of Dust’

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi was born in Lebanon in 1972 and emigrated with her family a decade later after Israeli troops invaded in pursuit of their Palestinian adversaries. It is a history that infuses “A Girl Made of Dust,’’ her first novel.

The narrator is a girl named Ruba, a child in a small, largely Christian town made uneasy by the encroaching boom of warfare rocking nearby Beirut. But under the static of worried adult conversation, Ruba has more immediate concerns. What, for example, did her father see one day in Beirut that so unsettled his mind that he has been depressed and reclusive since, leaving Ruba’s mother and grandmother to shoulder the burdens? Why has her Muslim playmate suddenly moved away? As for the new girl who doesn’t speak, why does she live with an old witch in the forest, and what is the connection between that family and Ruba’s?

Despite occasional passages of dialogue exposition that jut awkwardly into the narrative, the author creates a sensuous, almost dreamlike evocation of a child’s perceptions, innocent and inquisitive, of a familiar setting misshapen by ancient prejudice and the approaching horror of war.

THIS LOVELY LIFE: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood
By Vicki Forman
Mariner, 272 pp., paperback, $13.95

When Vicki Forman went into labor less than six full months into pregnancy, she knew it could not end well for her tiny twins. They weighed barely a pound each, works in progress terrifyingly unprepared to survive. “Let them go,’’ she begged her doctors.

Instead, heedless of consequences, the hospital charged into super-preemie overdrive. One baby, a daughter, lived only a few days. The other, a son, hung on through crisis after crisis. Each emergency surgery, each powerful medication, each stopgap measure to which his fragile body was subjected only made another dire condition worse. After six months, profoundly disabled both physically and mentally, he was finally sent home with his parents, who became his new round-the-clock intensive care team while also trying to lead their lives, earn a living, and raise a healthy older daughter. They battled exhaustion and depression, incomprehension, fear, and despair.

By rights this memoir should be unreadable. Instead it is a lucid and transcendent account of human frailty and superhuman mother love. The system broke, but individual courage held tight.

REASONS FOR AND ADVANTAGES OF BREATHING
By Lydia Peelle
Harper Perennial, 208 pp., paperback, $13.99

Moving in with her boyfriend “is the start of something,’’ Lydia Peelle observes about one character in this story collection, though “maybe not the start she was looking for.’’ With humor and insight, these sharply etched fictions illuminate turning points reached, or in some cases long since passed, in lives conscribed by limited horizons.

A teenager working at a stable, where bored housewives keep their horses, appraises the adult behavior to which her job exposes her. A young man on the run from some private grief hooks up with a traveling carnival, though he lacks the requisite cynicism. In the title story a lonely woman struggling through a divorce befriends a scientist whose enthusiasm for the mysteries of nature begins to coax her out of her immobilizing unhappiness.

Peelle vividly evokes a setting and brings its inhabitants - frequently odd, marginal types, social misfits, rural holdouts in a vanishing middle America - instantly and convincingly to life. She then develops an incident, an encounter, a change of heart that enlarges her sketch into a full-length portrait of a figure in a landscape about whom and about which we suddenly seem to understand everything essential.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.