Salvation

From the prize-winning author Lucia Nevai comes the smart, poignant, and richly imagined novel "Salvation," the coming of age story of Crane Cavanaugh. Born into a family of three former charlatan preachers and two older siblings living in poverty in rural Iowa, Crane is a budding scientist with a rich awareness of the natural world and her own precarious spot in it. Crane narrates her life from the moment of birth through disfiguration in the womb to well-deserved elevation in the halls of academe. Separated from the sister and brother who tried to protect her in infancy, and assigned by welfare workers to life in a convent, Crane rebels. Her belligerence causes the nuns to put her up for adoption and she is reborn as Princess Hopkins by an adoring, middle-class adoptive mother. Princess/Crane inhabits parallel worlds, using her scientific precocity and formidable intellect to attain an inner continuity that remains unfazed, nonjudgmental, and cheerful. Witty and richly intelligent, arch and earnest, "Salvation "has a Dickensian narrative reach, an empathetic heart, and a naturalist's eye for both the vagaries and the logic of human nature.