One should never say never to a novelist with as estimable a track record as the veteran Richard Bausch, but one is tempted to argue that the device of telling parallel (or perpendicular) stories set in different centuries has been so overused in recent years that it should never be dusted off again. In his engaging if overlong narrative, we follow Lily Austin on a personal journey through a rough childhood and through marriage into a complicated Southern family, and on a literary one, as she attempts to write a play about 19th-century explorer Mary Kingsley. The connections Bausch draws between different eras and modes of female adventuresomeness are not quite worth the pages Kingsley's life is granted, but he's still a skilled, compelling storyteller.
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