My brother Michael /

In a first novel that oozes Southern authenticity like honey over a hot biscuit, Gabriel Catts, a Civil War historian and academic raised in a small north Florida mill town, tells the turbulent story of his unquenchable love for his brother's wife. The son of a poor day laborer and a strict though loving Baptist mother, young Gabriel falls in love with Myra, the girl next door, whose father is savagely abusive. No sooner is Gabriel attracted, however, than Myra leaves to live with relatives in Alabama. Nearly a decade later, Gabriel, visiting home from college, finds that Myra has returned to town and has married his own brother, Michael. Heartbroken but resigned, Gabriel leaves for graduate school up north. Years later, he comes back once more and is invited to live with his brother, who has become an absent super-provider, working endless hours at the mill to buy a pretty house for his wife and to back his brother's intellectual dreams. Ostensibly writing a book but unable to suppress his love for Myra, who, unbeknownst to him, has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and put on lithium, Gabriel plunges into an affair with her and tries to convince her to marry him. Myra's pregnancy precipitates Gabriel's exile for another decade. After his brother dies at 43 and Gabriel weathers another heartrending reunion with Myra, their love child and his family, he sits down to grapple with his life story. Though Owen's fraternal melodrama can't avoid sentimentality, her fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Despite a slightly irregular storyline, this first novel is certain to create a loyal readership for Owens. The narrative voice of Gabriel Catts, who relates the story of his lifelong love for his brother's wife, is nothing short of stunning. Myra, loved by both Gabriel and his brother, Michael, lives a life irrevocably tainted by a childhood of abuse and incest at the hands of her father. Added to the characters' other emotional demons-insanity and infidelity-the story could have been a dark and depressing one. Instead, because Owens depicts these demons against the backdrop of Southern cultural and familial restrictions that ultimately offer salvation, the story is one of quiet victory. Recommended for libraries with Southern fiction collections.-Susan C. Colegrove, Athens Regional Lib. System, Ga. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A luminously written first novel that celebrates--not always convincingly--a surviving sibling's redemption and gratitude. When younger brother Gabe Catts comes home to north Florida for his brother Michael's funeral, he's been drinking, and he soon flees the family and heads back to New York, where he teaches college. Gabe is overcome by more than conventional grief, it seems, and the story he tells is as much a journey of self- discovery as of brotherly love and destructive jealousy. It begins in the small neighborhood of Magnolia Hill, where Gabe grew up and where his mother still lives. His father was a millworker. He had two siblings, a sister, Candace, and then Michael, named (like Gabe) after an angel. Next door, in a tumbledown house, lived the Sims--a mother and father with two children, Ira and Myra. Gabe falls in love with Myra. But the Simses are different: Dad beats up Ira and sexually abuses Myra, and when Dad is arrested, the family moves away. Meanwhile, Michael, a promising baseball player, turns down offers and stays home to help his parents, and Gabe, who's never forgotten Myra, goes on to college and graduate school. Myra comes back to Magnolia Hill and soon marries Michael, a union that the self-absorbed Gabe finds tough to accept. He flees north, combining a successful academic career with bouts of heavy, near- suicidal, drinking. Having taken time off to write a book, he returns home once more, seduces and impregnates Myra, by now being treated for schizophrenia, then flees when his betrayal is discovered. Ten years later, dying from cancer, Michael asks Gabe to look after his family. He also leaves him a lot of money, and with some bumps along the way, Gabe finds both happiness and his soul, just as his brother had hoped. A bit too schematic, but a refreshingly different take on fraternal rivalry.