The boys of my youth

Jo Ann Beard grew up amid a tightly knit clan of mothers, aunts, sisters, and girlfriends. Her steadfast family and its culture of women somehow made the prospect of dangerous neighborhood boys, friendly barflies, and potential romance all the more irresistible. But in these wonderfully engaging memory pieces, the boys of Beard's youth - and the men who eventually replace them - are elusive characters. Beloved boy dolls disintegrate, grade school crushes dissipate, and husbands disappear. The relationships that endure are the ones between women. Childhood dramas are balanced by actual tragedies and adult betrayals, and Beard captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigences of time and fate like no other writer. In the title story, two old friends, stumbling away from ruined marriages, remember the darkest moments of abandonment, but also the thrilling momentum of a car doing ninety and the strange allure of teenage basketball players. In the end, they realize that in matters of the heart, nothing much, yet somehow everything, has changed.