STILL SHE HAUNTS ME (2008)

Roiphe, who began as a non-fiction writer, endured a wave of fury from feminists with 1993's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, which questioned the validity of date rape. But with her first novel, Roiphe exhibits an entirely different sensibility -- and sensitivity -- in a slight but slick imagining of the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, and his child muse, Alice Liddell. Based on (but not confined to) historical information about the Oxford math professor and his Dean's preteen daughter, Still She Haunts Me manages to escape being an easy, Lolita-like story, and instead focuses on the cloudy complications of unrequited romance, where one is ''stuck forever in that state of almost having.''