TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 7/31/97: I Know You Really Love Me: A Psychiatrist's Journal Of Erotomania, Stalking, and Obsessive Love By Doreen Orion Nonfiction 7/30/97: The Wishbones By Tom Perrotta Fiction 7/29/97: The Triumph of Meanness Nicolaus Mills Nonfiction 7/28/97: Already Dead Denis Johnson Fiction 7/25/97: Eat Your Way Across The U.S.A. By Jane and Michael Stern Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: Wasted Youth Novels By Andrew Hultkrans Three new novels take you to the throbbing pulse of decadent youth culture -- yawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

s o u l k i s s _________ BY SHAY YOUNGBLOOD _____________________________RIVERHEAD | 207 PAGES | FICTION BY JABARI ASIM --> Shay Youngblood's first book, a collection called "The Big Mama Stories," painted the subjects of those stories with strokes that felt too broad. The result was similar to an unsuccessful watercolor: too much water, not enough color. Youngblood unwisely eschewed the accumulation of detail necessary to create believable, fully dimensioned characters. Instead she demanded too much of readers by requiring them to fill in the voluminous spaces left in her narratives. What a pleasant surprise, then, to see that the author's skills have grown tremendously since her first effort. By keeping her characters to a small, manageable quantity, Youngblood has fashioned a memorable novel in "Soul Kiss," one that transforms a young girl's odyssey toward adulthood into an erotic, complex and compelling journey. At the novel's beginning, 7-year-old Mariah Kin Santos, having completed a long trip from Manhattan, Kan., to a small town in Georgia, is left in the care of two spinster aunts. Mariah, the offspring of an intense, brief affair between Coral, an emotionally fragile nurse, and Matisse, a talented but unstable painter, initially refuses to believe her mother has abandoned her. So she waits for her mother's return: "Not a day passed that I did not expect her to walk into the room as if she had never left." Days grow into weeks, months into years, and Coral remains nowhere in sight. Mariah becomes a headstrong, sexually curious adolescent who finds comfort in music and poetry. Complaining that her aunts' old-fashioned habits threaten to suffocate her, Mariah boards a bus for California. There she meets her father, an enigmatic man with talent to burn and little hope of harnessing it. When their mutual attraction becomes a dangerous flirtation, Mariah returns to Georgia. Although the novel is slim, it is anything but light. Mariah's journey is filled with peril and pain. Youngblood reveals herself as first and foremost a stylist, creating finely nuanced sentences through the delicate, careful application of figures of speech. For Mariah, laughter can sting "like clouds of bees," and a soul kiss can spread through her body "like hot honey." The author's deft manipulation of poetic devices seems particularly apt because "Soul Kiss" is also about language as a liberating force. Mariah accomplishes her troubled quest for self-knowledge primarily through her engagement with words and phrases. From childhood on, Mariah has coped with various challenges by collecting and consuming words, reveling in their beauty and power, literally swallowing them whole. When Mariah takes control of language -- writing poems in a notebook, confessing her deepest hurts and desires to her Aunt Faith -- she finally becomes free to experience the world as an adult. "It is as if the weight of a thousand stones has been lifted from my chest," Mariah says. "I am light as a page in a blank book. I feel empty, but somehow whole." Readers who complete Mariah's trek with her will be glad they came along. Aug. 1, 1997 Jabari Asim is assistant editor at the Washington Post Book World. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html