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Review | 'Normal People Don't Live Like This': Headed for the flame in 1970s Manhattan

NORMAL PEOPLE DON'T LIVE LIKE THIS. Dylan Landis. Persea. 182 pages. $15 in paper.

Dylan Landis has a gift for creating characters. Her first book of fiction revolves around Leah Levinson, a teenage girl in 1970s Manhattan, and it is in her character details that the writing comes to life. Of Helen, Leah's anorexic mother, she writes, ``Toast cooled before her.'' Of the school slut: ``The Gospel of Angeline Yost is graven into desks with house keys and the blood of Bics; it is written in the glances of girls -- low arcs of knowing that span the hallways and ping off the metal lockers.'' Of the women in the welfare building where Leah's mother rents a secret room: ``The women looked at her with curbstone eyes.''

These are cocktails for Landis, these are not even protagonists. Leah is the girl to which things happen. She's the one worth worrying about. She's the one with the heart that ``sprouted like a seed'' when she thought another girl, Rainey, might actually be her friend; she's the one who knows

Stay cool and delve into a good book this summer

You could squander your summer plowing through a pile of trashy paperbacks. You could spill iced tea or margaritas on their pages and never mind the damage. No one would even question your choice of reading matter, because the weather is just too hot or rainy for you to get worked up much.

However, if summer brings you more than your usual quotient of time to relax, why not delve into books with a little more meat on their bones? Here are some of summer fiction's best bets.

The Family Man . Elinor Lipman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 305 pages. $25. Out now.

Review | Finding herself in 'Havana and Other Missing Fathers'

Havana and Other Missing Fathers. Mia Leonin. Arizona. 192 pages. $16.95 in paper.

A quick troll through the memoir shelves of bookstores can reveal a lot of tragedy. If written by a woman, the stories tend to winnow to the following: once I was fat and made fun of; once I drank enough to float my eyeballs out of my head; once I had a really horrible husband, mother, childhood, wardrobe.

Some of these writs to the past are heart rending, others comical. But all too many have become familiar in their accounts of transgressions committed and overcome. So I was delighted at the arrival of Mia Leonin's singular and beautifully written memoir. Leonin is a poet, dance and theater critic and creative writing instructor at the University of Miami, and her fine arts and journalistic skills are on full display as she recalls the discovery of her father and her ethnicity through travel, romantic love and the charged meanings behind the everyday speak of English and Spanish.

Loss of father was big lesson for actress Diaz

From the window of the sunlit suite where Cameron Diaz sits, there is a beautiful view of the Santa Monica beach with blue sky and fluffy white clouds.The 36-year-old star is dressed to match -- a lightweight white sweater with thin blue horizontal stripes, white slacks.

She seems relaxed and happy.

''That's how I feel inside,'' she says, smiling. ``I'm glad that it shows. I like to put nice things out in the world.''

'Color Purple,' the musical, comes to Arsht

Celie, the central character in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple , lives a life most folks would consider unendurable.

A poor black girl who grows up in Georgia in the early 1900s, she's still a young teenager when she gives birth to two babies fathered by the man she thinks is her father, babies he takes away right after they're born. She is traded, along with a cow, to a cruel widower with kids, a farmer who abuses her verbally and physically, a man so determined to deny Celie any joy that he hides years' worth of loving letters from the sister who left to work as a missionary in Africa.

Yet Celie does endure, finds love, reclaims her life and her family. Walker's powerful tale of trial and triumph has sparked the imaginations of uncounted readers, the millions who saw Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated 1985 film of The Color Purple -- and, since 2005, the nearly two million theatergoers who have gone on Celie's journey in its newest form as a Broadway musical