Wonder Girl

Melissa Bank’s “The Wonder Spot” is out in paperback.  It is almost as good as her excellent first book, “The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing.”

Her heroine is Sophie Applebaum, the engagingly innocent and goodhearted young girl who, in the second of the interrelated stories that make up this coming-of-age collection, attends the fictional Rogers College and meets, on the evening before the semester begins, her roommate Venice Lambourne, a thin, tall, blond knockout, who arrives at the dorm in a cab:

She told me that she’d been traveling and was exhausted; she’d come all the way from Antibes.

I hadn’t heard of Antibes but vaguely remembered a movie called Raid on Entebbe, and it was in Israel or somewhere in Africa?  Was Israel in Africa?

“Wow,” I said, and then suggested that maybe she wanted to check in with our resident adviser, a button-nosed teddy bear named Betsy, who’d been worried.

This Venice seemed not to hear.  “I need a drink,” she said.

When I told her about the soda machine in the basement, she turned and looked at me as though I was the last and possibly the longest leg of her trip.

She’d passed a bar that she said was close and open.  “Those might be its only virtues,” she said, “but they are the only virtues I care about at the moment.”

I hesitated; with the lack of self-knowledge I’d exhibit for years to come, I’d signed up for an eight o’clock class.

It is a nicely written book, worth curling up with on a Shabbat afternoon.

Chag Sameach.