DISCOVERIES

Map of Ireland

A Novel

Stephanie Grant

Scribner: 198 pp., $22

ANN AHERN is a freckle-faced 17-year-old Irish American tomboy growing up in South Boston, attending public school during the desegregation campaign of the 1970s. It is a fascinating time for a protagonist so noble and vulnerable at the same time. Ann is pigheaded, with a tendency toward pyromania. She falls in love/lust with her Senegalese French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugenie, and thus finds herself a student of the Black Power movement. “On the first day of French class,” she recalls, in her bold and straightforward way, “the color shone off Mademoiselle Eugenie’s skin, and I realized then, for the first time, that black had other colors in it.”

Race, sex and community are the complicated and dangerous pillars of the novel. Ann Ahern wants, literally, to climb out of her own skin, to be part of something larger than herself. This urgency fuels the novel and makes her unforgettable -- unknowable but unforgettable.

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After Hours at the Almost Home

A Novel

Tara Yellen

Unbridled Books: 262 pp., $14.95 paper

WELCOME to the Almost Home, a bar and grill in Denver. It’s JJ’s seventh job, but her first time waitressing (“The food slid a bit on the plates, . . . but nothing fell”). The learning curve is steep; JJ’s first day is Super Bowl Sunday. Beer, fries and a bunch of rowdy Bronco fans.

Readers should not look too hard for any deep messages; this is not a novel with a moral agenda. “Don’t ever trust restaurant love,” the bartender tells JJ, which is about as profound as it gets. But the employees at the Almost Home could break your heart -- all lost and found at the same time. Colleen, a waitress, keeps spotting the ghost of her young husband, hit by a car two years earlier. She brings her 14-year-old daughter, Lily, to work with her. Lily steals the show.

How can you learn how to be an adult when all the adults around you act like children? “After Hours” is a snapshot of a novel, lovingly contained between the neon sign and the back door. Contents under pressure.

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Split

A Memoir of Divorce

Suzanne Finnamore

Dutton: 272 pp., $24.95

AS gripping as Suzanne Finnamore’s story of her husband’s precipitous departure and her subsequent descent into hell may be, it is only one side of the story. This causes a sort of teetering, a tremor in the structure of “Split,” rather like a woman wearing 3-inch heels who has had too much to drink. The other side, like the husband, is missing.

Not that he’s in the least bit likable, this “N” person to whom Finnamore was married for seven years -- don’t get me wrong. Words like “Liar!” and “Good riddance!” spring to mind while you’re reading “Split,” as well as a near-irresistible urge to warn Finnamore that large objects are hurtling, unforeseen, toward her (“Of course he’s cheating, you numskull!”).

Chalk it up to youth (though she is 40 when he leaves her and their toddler son), but there’s an odd lack of connection, of soul, in this relationship. One doesn’t feel that a fabric has been rent or that these two lives were ever more than superficially (much talk of house and friends and things) joined. This makes it harder to grieve, easier to laugh alongside. Bunny, Finnamore’s mother, who arrives with cigarettes and a fifth of something strong, is the Rock of Gibraltar, a testament to motherhood, a beacon for us all.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com