DISCOVERIES

REACH

Finding Strength, Spirit, and Personal Power

By Laila Ali with David Ritz

Hyperion: 182 pp., $21.95

Laila Ali’s swan dive into juvenile delinquency can make a reader keenly aware of the precariousness of a child’s world. The daughter of an international hero, Muhammad Ali, Laila--who was born in 1977--and her older sister Hanna grew up in the most privileged atmosphere L.A. had to offer. But she was terrified all the time: of the strangers in her house; of the distance, physical and emotional, between herself and her parents; of the Muslim prayers she and her sister were forced to say in a foreign language.

Laila was molested at 5 and 11 by visiting relatives. There was no one to tell. Her parents were distracted, first by fame, then by divorce. She got into schoolyard fights and finally stealing. She was pregnant at 16. At 17, she was arrested for credit card fraud and sent to juvenile jail for three months. From there, the judge sent her to a placement home, where she heard stories worse than her own. Once out, she found her talent, which lay, to everyone’s surprise, in boxing. In 1999, Laila fought her first professional fight. The story is gripping, the writing upbeat but sometimes trite, and the success too sudden (Ali is 24). “Reach” is a book on the edge.

*

ON WHALE ISLAND

Notes From a Place I Never Meant to Leave

By Daniel Hayes

Algonquin Books: 240 pp., $22.95

Daniel Hayes’ easygoing humor barely masks his obsession with a 50-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia, which he bought instead of going to medical school. He is, by nature, a recluse, a married recluse with a 9-year-old stepson. On the surface, “On Whale Island” is a well-told tale of the year he and his family went to live on the island. But Hayes is running from as much as he is running to.

“I’ve not been able to convince them that the world is ending,” he writes, barely joking, “so there is a certain urgency lacking in their whole attitude.” He is honest in describing his struggle with stepparenthood. At year’s end, the family returns to Idaho (as they had previously agreed), and Hayes, in the book’s epilogue, sounds miserable.

Unlike creators of Hollywood movies, editors of books usually do not insist on happy endings. Still, some people are strongly called by place and are only half themselves elsewhere. Hayes may be one of these people.

*

IF THE SPIRIT MOVES YOU

Life and Love After Death

By Justine Picardie

Riverhead Books: 258 pp., $23.95

There is a wind in “If the Spirit Moves You,” a door opening in space, a feeling that comes not from the writing, which is cramped by the author’s pain and by her years as a journalist. Justine Picardie lost her sister Ruth to cancer. After three years of nightmares and longing, she began this book. As the editor of the Observer magazine, Picardie gave Ruth a chance to write about dying. The immensely popular columns were collected into a bestselling book: “Before I Say Goodbye.”

In her travels doing publicity for the book, Picardie seeks out experts who communicate in various ways with the dead. She wants a sign that her sister is not lost to her. The book is framed in diary entries between Good Friday 2000 and Easter Sunday 2001, interspersed with quotes from Scriptures and from “A Dictionary of Superstitions.”

It is a scary book, in spite of its purposeful tone. A reader feels the resistance to approaching that other world. Hearing voices, Picardie’s husband reminds her, is considered a sign of schizophrenia. Along with Picardie, we want a sign from Ruth, but we dread it.

*

LONGING

By Gunnar Kopperud

Translated from the Norwegian

by Christopher Jamieson

Bloomsbury: 250 pp., $23.95

“Longing is for something you hope is coming, loss is for something you know has gone.” In this fierce novel, an Italian war correspondent finds himself in love with a young, female Iranian soldier who has been raised traditionally to marry whomever her parents choose and to never look a man in the eye. They meet in a trench, and we never learn their names or how they got to the point at which they meet.

In books, as in relationships, there is a trade-off between atmospheric silence and trust. Sometimes the gaps in information enter a reader’s consciousness more effectively than detail. Sometimes it is the detail that cements the author-reader relationship.

“Longing” is written from the point of view of each lover, which sets up a longing for the two to merge as they travel and fight--two objects hurling toward each other in the space between the book’s covers.