Fusco avoids sentimentality in her story of a shy teenager and her feisty great aunt

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 20, 2004

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

TENDING TO GRACE, by Kimberly Newton Fusco. Knopf. 167 pages. $14.95.

This fine first novel by Kimberly Newton Fusco, an award-winning reporter and editor for 15 years at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette who lives in Foster, is billed as a young adult novel, but I read it without knowing that, and enjoyed it immensely.

That either suggests I can still be considered a young adult, which is stretching things a bit, or that this is a very good book for any age.

The set-up is simple. Fourteen-year-old Cornelia Thornhill is dumped by her flighty and self-absorbed mother, who is off to Las Vegas with her boyfriend, at her Great Aunt Agatha's decaying house in the sticks. Agatha -- nicknamed "Crow Lady" by the neighbors -- prides herself on her self-sufficiency, feistiness, and querulous outspokenness. She grows her own food, rides around in an ancient truck named Bertha, and uses an outhouse named Esther.

Cornelia, painfully shy and withdrawn, stutters whenever she speaks, which isn't often. The story, told by her, reveals her hunkering down within herself, bereft of a mother's love, made fun of at school, and abandoned by friends. She seeks refuge in books, consuming them as if they were life itself.

Of course, she and the crusty Agatha will come to terms, but Fusco avoids sentimentality and focuses on details, images and encounters that conjure up Agatha's distinctively rural existence and way of life.

As we follow Cornelia's shocks of recognition and wry redemption, we come upon frog races, lightning bugs, the teepee Agatha builds for her, occasional characters who develop into friends, fiddlehead ferns, and dark swamps. We also learn that Agatha's baby, named Grace, died years ago and that Agatha has set up a grave in the woods to remember her, even though Grace died in an institution. Thus "tending to grace" becomes both a literal ritual and a description of Cornelia's own self-discoveries.

The novel is written in clipped, lyrical, short chapters, each of which begins with a few lines in extra large type, suggesting a child's primer. This emphasizes the episodic nature of Cornelia's new life and highlights different moments of her self-awareness.

At one point, Cornelia tastes the fiddlehead preserves that Agatha has made and finds the stuff inedible: "Fiddleheads taste cold and bitter, like wet nails." To which Agatha replies, "Fiddleheads ain't for everybody," and they both erupt with laughter.

It is Fusco's triumph to make what could have been a sticky-sweet narrative into a tart and dry-eyed tale of gradual grace and personal salvation.

Sam Coale of Providence is a frequent reviewer.