God Don't Like Ugly.

God Don't Like Ugly by Mary Monroe Kensington, October 2000, $15.00, ISBN 1-575-66607-3

One of the biggest challenges for a writer is to depict dreary lives without telling a dreary story. Mary Monroe accomplishes this for the first three-fourths of her new novel. Annette Goode is a chubby, lonely, sweet-natured child living from hand to mouth with her loving, but struggling, parents in Florida. When her father deserts them, Annette and her mother, Gussie Mae, are transplanted to Ohio under the sponsorship of Gussie Mae's brothel-running friend.

In Ohio, Annette's innocence is destroyed when Boatwright, a disgusting, yet brilliantly rendered child rapist, is taken in by her mother as a boarder. His first appearance in the book is literally as a wolf in sheep's clothing, "decked out in a fleecy white suit and a lopsided fedora." Monroe's depiction of his first violation of the little girl is appropriately horrifying. Annette endures nearly a decade of abuse before she befriends Rhoda, the undertaker's daughter. Though she's as slim and beautiful as Annette is fat and therefore supposedly ugly, Rhoda is just as socially isolated. There's something amiss about the strange, cold look that sometimes comes into Rhoda's eyes.

When Boatwright comes face-to-face with the ultimate consequences of his actions, one expects some resolution to take the reader to a new level of involvement. Instead, to the reader's frustration, the novel limps to a relatively mundane conclusion as the sad lives of Annette, her mother and their neighbors grind on through the '60s, '70s and to the edge of the '80s. Well-written and heartbreaking for its first 200 pages, God Don't Like Ugly attempts to tackle serious and, unfortunately, far too rarely addressed issues, but appears to stumble over its own self-consciously personal tone.

Arlene McKanic is a freelance writer living in Queens, NE.