A Message of Hope for the Stricken Ladies in Hiding

Even Pretty Girls Cry at Night by Merrill Joan Gerber (Crosswinds: $2.25 paperback; 156 pages)

Joan Gerber’s book is packaged like the popular romance series, which are the teen equivalent of Harlequins. The book’s title, the soulful cover picture (subheaded “It’s always darkest before the dawn”) and the bright advertising offer inserted in the book (“Fabulous gifts absolutely free! Four free books, a free manicure set and a free mystery gift!”) all suggest a romantic fantasy manufactured to appeal to a minimally thoughtful audience.

You can’t tell a book by its cover, though. The novel is far better and richer than one anticipates. No one can blame publishers for wanting to sell books, but let’s hope the packaging doesn’t deter readers from a skillful writer who has published work in fine literary journals and who has been included in “Prize O. Henry Stories.”

“Crow is the name they call me,” the girl narrator begins. The story is about why they call her that and what happens to give her a new self and a new understanding of life. Crow isn’t the pretty girl of the title; she has scoliosis, hides in a feathery down coat despite the broiling Miami sun and personally knows a lot about crying at night. Her mother’s dead, and since she died, her father, Shadow, crippled in Vietnam, has been so withdrawn he just hasn’t noticed that she has grown up crooked.

She Cries at Night

What she needs to learn is that even Marcia, the future Olympic swimmer and resident beauty at Sea ‘n’ Surf Retirement Apartments, cries at night too. And by extension so does all the world, from salty old Gertie Roth--who lost most of her family to the concentration camps and has a bad heart--to Florence King, Marcia’s rich, tanned, snobbish mother--who seemingly has everything, including a drug dependency that drives her daughter to attempted suicide.

They sound like a grim lot, but what makes the book so charming and so readable is its stylistic vitality and its exuberant sense of life’s unfailing capacity to surprise and delight.

Gertie is a wise old teacher (and the fact that she has a darling grandson come to visit doesn’t hurt either, especially because Simon finds charms even in a girl whose back isn’t perfectly straight). But there’s also Yetta Korn, an aging beauty doing water ballet every day in outlandishly decorated swimming caps.

A down-to-earth fairy godmother, Gertie has taught Simon that you can cry later when you’re dead; now you “have to hurry and live for the ones who didn’t live, so don’t interrupt living,” and he passes it on to Crow, who’s “grateful, suddenly, to be here. Hump and all.”

Secret Poems, Swimming

Crow learns to help others and to help herself. She has comforted herself with secret poetry and secret swimming at night (symbols of possibility and freedom). Eventually she gives up her self-imposed public silence, stops hiding in her uncomfortable jacket, and swims openly. She also finds a doctor who will make her straight.

The whole ends with a hilarious aquatic wedding. Yetta gets married afloat. And in the future, maybe a straight Crow and Simon will be next.