THE PHANTOM LIMBS OF THE ROLLOW SISTERS is an unusual title; fitting, because this is an unusual book. Timothy Schaffert's debut novel concerns the lives of two eccentric sisters who live in a junk shop in rural Nebraska. The girls, Lily and Mabel Rollow, appear to the reader as if reflected in a crazy fun house mirror, all impossible angles and out-of-kilter features. Weighing in at just 228 pages, the novel is nonetheless very dense, putting the reader in touch with the thoughts, actions, and dreams of the girls and a dozen other quirky characters. The characters are well drawn and interesting, although so much happens to them that it is difficult to say you get to know them.

Lily and Mabel are 19 and 21, respectively, and have had a load of hardship thrown at them in their brief lives. Deserted both by their father, through suicide, and their mother, by voluntary abandonment, the young women grow up with their grandmother who runs a junk shop outside of the small town of Bonnevilla, Nebraska. At the start of the novel, Grandma has moved to Florida, leaving Mabel and Lily to their own devices. The women, particularly Mabel, are more like old souls than anxious adolescents, and Schaffert draws Mabel with a particularly sharp pen. "A broken spring poked at the back of Mabel's leg. It seemed to Mabel that, in such a car, one would be inspired by the spirit of renegade youth and not be scared of anything. But the only thing that affected Mabel was the view out the window. The sun was setting at the end of the desolation, casting its sharp glow across the miles of nothingness before reaching a good place." Mabel alternately covets and despises Lily's erstwhile boyfriend, the androgynous Jordan, one of quite a cast of eccentric characters that people the novel.

Schaffert grew up on a Nebraska farm, although he certainly harbors no sentimentality for rural America. His characters and episodes veer wildly, and sometimes too heavily, into the grotesque: Mabel remembers an incident where their mother hits a sandhill crane in the road; Jordan attempts suicide so as to be forever important to a former girlfriend; Lily hurls the vilest curses imaginable at their mother; Mabel encounters the family of a drowned girl and spontaneously lies that she was the recipient of the dead girl's transplanted corneas; Mabel consults a severely brain damaged girl who functions as something like the Oracle at Delphi. It is all a bit heavy handed, and the dialogue at times seems clunky and out of place. "'I ruined Mabel's birthday,' Lily said. 'She'll be lonely when we're gone,' Jordan said. 'Mabel will be fine,' Lily said." But then there are passages like this, with Jordan describing his suicide attempt, "But hell, yea, I'm glad I didn't die. She was kind of a toothy girl, really, and you know, she didn't really dance as well as she thought she did." It's beautiful, exactly the opposite of clunky.

It is no surprise that the more capricious Lily, with Jordan in tow, sets off on a quest to find their mother, leaving Mabel to mind the store. Lily finds her mother Fiona living in a desert convent, helping tend a vineyard. Fiona's ambivalence at being found spurs Lily to return home and make peace with Mabel.

Having grown up in Nebraska, although not the rural part, I take particular interest in novels set in the state. I know, you're thinking, "Exactly how many novels can be set in a state where there are more cows than people?" There are more than you think. In fact, the state has a fine literary tradition, and THE PHANTOM LIMBS OF THE ROLLOW SISTERS makes an interesting, if offbeat, addition.

   --- Reviewed by Shannon Bloomstran (shanpb@swbell.net)

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