St. Petersburg Times A MOUTHFUL OF AIR by Amy Koppelman (MacAdam/Cage Publishing, $23, 212 pp) A Mouthful of Air, in contrast to The Cuban Prospect, is a tragic story of a young woman groping her way through a life that is as far from the mythic proportions of baseball as one life can get. If anything, Julia Davis, the heroine, is a woman who shares all the tragedy of Sylvia Plath's life with none of the poetry and striving for career. She is, in fact, a young woman who has lost any sense of why she is alive, who struggles to make sense of her role as a young mother, as the wife of a loving husband who is an ample provider. Yet, though Davis herself is no poet, Koppelman's prose is as spare and powerful as poetry.

The novel opens as Julia is returning to a life she attempted to leave by suicide only a month earlier. A victim of intense postpartum depression one year after the birth of her son, Teddy, Julia is living one step, one breath at a time. "She takes a mouthful of air, holds it, releases. This is something she learned at the hospital. If she wants to be a wife to Ethan and a mother to Teddy, she must allow herself to breathe."

Yet it is a mark of Koppelman's success as a storyteller that Julia never seems small or self-pitying.

A Mouthful of Air is a portrait of a woman who wonders, daily, whether each new day will be her last. Rooted in the minutiae of modern city and, eventually, suburban life, the novel finds its strength in Julia's struggle to be normal. Each day Julia finds reasons to be hopeful like a somnambulist finds reasons to believe she is awake. In the end, it is with this very trick of the mind that Koppelman completes her devastating tale.

- Mindi Dickstein lives in New Jersey and is currently writing lyrics for the Broadway-bound musical Little Women.

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