Library Journal By Andrea Kempf I Smile Back Amy Koppelman (Two Dollar Radio, $15)

A beautiful, thirty-something suburban housewife, Laney Brooks is married with two lovely children to a successful insurance broker and author. However, her perfect life is a facade: she drinks too much, pops pills, snorts cocaine, and sleeps with any man who catches her eye. Koppelman's portrait of this self-destructive suburban matron is wrenchingly accurate. In elegant, almost poetic prose, she guides readers through the mind-numbing activities that make up Laney's days and dissects those events that have precipitated her deep, chronic clinical depression. This short novel is not an easy read; so vividly is Laney's misery limned that as the heroine spirals downward, readers intimately share her agonies. The author, whose first novel, A Mouthful of Air, de tailed a young New Yorker's postpartum depression, is becoming the spot-on chronicler of 21st-century women with mental illness. Her brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain with readers long after they've finished the book. Highly recommended for literary collections.

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