Seven Days Seven Sins

Description for SEVEN DAYS SEVEN SINS by Pamela Ditchoff: From Publishers Weekly Using the biblical sins and the days of the week as a framework, this collection of interlocked stories about a smalltown neighborhood is faintly surreal and startlingly honest, casting the outward stability of its subjects' lives into doubt. The stories are presented by precocious 12-year-old Angela, who watches her Lantern Hill Lane neighbors with X-ray eyes. She isn't the only one peering through windows. In "Lust," George, a paleontologist, spies on hopelessly obese Opal with binoculars as he cares for his father, who is slowly losing his mind. In "Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living," one of the book's more programmatic tales, Opal nearly loses her bank job because of her weight-but she wins by threatening her supervisors with a lawsuit. Ditchoff (The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies) memorably zooms in on private lives, showing them nakedly without ever becoming too clumsy or outrageous.