SOUL KISS

This first novel by playwright and storywriter Youngblood (The Big Mama Stories, 1989) is a young girl's tale of sadness and longing. It's also an erotic odyssey that seems to trace the narrator's incipient lesbianism to her misplaced feelings for her parents. In the 1960s, Mariah Santos, a seven-year-old girl of mixed racial heritage, lives happily with her mother, a military nurse, on a base in Kansas. But that idyllic life turns sour when Mariah's mother's lover breaks off their affair, and her mother becomes a drug addict. No longer do Mariah and her mother share their daily ``soul kisses'' or their love of words, and Mariah is soon shipped off to live with two great-aunts in Georgia, where she spends her adolescence longing for her mother's comforting bosom. Living with Faith and Merleen—who aren't actually sisters but lovers—Mariah quickly falls into their routines of home cooking, good manners, churchgoing, and hygiene. An excellent student, she also finds release in her cello. At age ten, she discovers her mother's trunk with all of its secrets, including information about her father, a painter living in Los Angeles. At 14, she deliberately causes enough trouble for her long-suffering aunts that they agree to let her head west to stay with her father. In their small West Hollywood apartment, Mariah develops a weird sexual life bordering on incest: She masturbates to her father's porn, wears his clothes when he's out, and has orgasmic dreams about him. When both he and she sense that things are getting out of hand, Mariah returns to Georgia, where she finally resolves her feelings about her long- absent mother and takes solace in the healing power of language. More mournful than soulful, this melancholic narrative is a decent addition to the literature of race and sexuality (with homage paid to Alice Walker et al.). Some didactic interludes intrude on an otherwise straightforward story of erotic confusion. (Book-of-the-Month alternate selection)