Angels and Manners

"Angels and Manners," by Cynn Chadwick. Bywater Books, 300 pages, $14.95 paper.

Carrie Angel is a working-class mother scraping by in Section 8 housing while apprenticing for her carpentry license, dueling with her demanding and emotionally abusive ex-husband for custody of her two teenage sons (one a feisty queer boy), and trying to contain her fiery temper. Jen Manners is a more hoity-toity woman - but, in the aftermath of an ugly divorce, she's forced to move onto Carrie's subsidized housing block with her aggrieved daughter, selling jewelry to get by. Lower-class and upper-class don't blend well at first, but eventually the two women bond - a friendship forged in part through the three teens - in this in-touch-with-the-times novel about home foreclosures, government cutbacks and a degrading downward economic spiral. Carrie and Jen both start out straight, but they aren't destined to fell in love - the lesbian twist involves a third woman. Instead, Chadwick's expertly constructed novel (she was once a master carpenter) focuses on the process of women learning to discover their strengths and to trust themselves.