Books in Brief

"Good Things"
by Mia King
Berkley, 352 pp., $14

Set in Seattle, this new novel by Hawaii author Mia King follows that age-old advice, "Write what you know." In 2000, King left her previous corporate life, sold most of her possessions and moved with her husband to the Big Island of Hawaii to "live simple."

The novel tells the story of Deidre McIntosh, who emerges as a sort of Seattle version of Martha Stewart — complete with a successful TV show about how to live more simply (along with cooking gourmet corn fritters with crème fraîche and doing nifty little crafts projects with rose hips and paper roses). Deidre is 40, single, and living with that almost-obligatory novelistic accessory of every gal-about-town, the gay best friend.

Deidre's ideal life is about to evaporate, though: Her TV show is abruptly canceled, her roommate moves in with his new lover and she's evicted from her luxury condo because the lease was in the roommate's name. Worse, Deidre has been overspending on a luxury wardrobe and all the accoutrements of the good life. And Kevin, that promising nice guy she meets, turns out to be the brother (and the financial backer) of the almost comically evil Marla, Deidre's successful TV rival.

The novel's second act finds Deidre in the country, living in Kevin's seldom-used home near Lake Wish. Author King sets up Deidre's new life, complete with a new best friend and a complete lack of e-mail/cellphone, with considerable panache.

The novel flags, however, in its third stage, when Deidre dithers about her relationship with Kevin and her attempts to find financial backing for a new show (whose premise doesn't sound all that riveting). Ultimately, she decides she's not really going to "live simple" after all; she's moving away from the country and back into the Seattle TV world, as well as lining up a new partnership to market a line of her cookies. But her journey out of the metropolis and back is entertaining, especially with an appendix of recipes for everything from Orgasmic Corn Fritters to Chocolate Cherry Crackle Cookies.

Reviewed by Melinda Bargreen

"Charity Girl"
by Michael Lowenthal
Houghton Mifflin, 323 pp., $24

Michael Lowenthal's novel "Charity Girl" illuminates a little-known corner of history. During World War I, the U.S. government incarcerated thousands of women under suspicion of being prostitutes, supposedly for the purpose of containing syphilis among military recruits. As the novel's endnote tells us, the majority of the women were detained without being charged with any offense, some for months at a time, and given forcible medical treatment. Many were "charity girls," young women of limited means who might allow a new acquaintance to buy them dinner or an evening out. ("How much you give back," says a character in the novel, "is up to you.")

It's fascinating, often enraging material; you wonder why it's not widely known. (Lowenthal first found mention of it in Susan Sontag's "AIDS and Its Metaphors.") And you wonder whether a nonfiction exploration of it might have been more compelling than "Charity Girl," a well-intentioned and yet lackluster work.

Frieda, its main character, is the teenage daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled her strict mother for a life of freedom in Boston. A fleeting liaison with a soldier (in whose affections Frieda stoutly believes) lands her with a venereal disease, and eventually to a detention home, where she joins other young women in a regimen of chores, lectures on morality, hellish medical exams, and dreaming of life outside the barbed-wire fence that surrounds them.

While Lowenthal provides some vivid details of World War I-era life (particularly the early scenes, in the bustling department store where Frieda works as a "bundler"), his characters remain flat, never springing to life. We sympathize with Frieda, whose youth and naiveté caused her misjudgments, but we never quite believe in her; she seems created in order to serve the novel's purpose, rather than existing on her own. "Charity Girl" is admirable in a historical context but too quickly forgettable as literature.

Reviewed by Moira Macdonald