The seven-year atomic make-over guide

the long version

From the admired author of Saint and The Perez Family come stories to touch the heart and mind alike, resonant with the sense of magic in everyday life and the generous way with character that are the hallmarks of Christine Bell's writing. In "Mockingbird," the one sound sleeper in a family of insomniacs recounts the travails of being married to a woman whose quest for a good night's rest drives her to ever more maddening quirks of behavior, and then into the arms of another man. "A Pillow and a Rock" invites us to imagine what may really have happened in the Presley household on the night Elvis and his stillborn (or was he?) twin brother came into the world, from the perspective of a worn-out country midwife faced with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: what to do with a motionless baby who won't cry, but won't die either? In "Cliff from Chicago, Annie McDermott, and Me," a woman finds her thoughts and feelings trapped in the space of what-might-have-been, when the muggers she escapes by a lucky accident kill the next woman they see. "The Good Thief" allows us to share the life chances of an ambitious young woman on the make, and shows us the strange consequences of thinking you're tougher than you really are. In the title story, we watch with a laugh in our throats and a growing sense of wonder and sympathy as the narrator sells the made-up story of her royal relatives to the tabloids and suffers her first broken heart. "Mercy" introduces us to two elderly women now retired in Florida - an adulteress from the Bronx and a faithful wife from Brooklyn - and the source of their remarkable bond years before in a snowbound bowling alley in Queens.