Dodging I.E.D.’s in Afghanistan might seem a logical, if not inevitable, destiny for the alienated youth of Warrenside, Pa., a moribund steel town where crack dealers and strip clubs beckon the unemployed, everyone owns a hunting rifle and junior warriors dress “in Kmart camouflage.” For Kat Warren-Bineki and Max Asad, the ill-fated lovers and Afghan war veterans in Monk’s mordant novel, an added incentive is the chance to escape their oppressive families. Kat returns to an embezzler dad and an unhinged mom with a penchant for parading naked in public. Max awaits a dreaded arranged marriage and a future managing the empire of his Lebanese father, an erstwhile scholar whose devotion to humanism has been replaced by a drive to amass a real estate empire. Virtually everyone in Monk’s precision-choreographed subversion of American myths is looking to swap the cards they’ve been dealt, most notably the local country club’s neighbor, Wind Storm, a self-styled Indian “Love Shaman” who has thrown off the Scandinavian half of her Swedish-Lenape heritage in favor of an earth-motherly identity, hunting and gathering stray golf balls in the woods. Jan Stuart, Fiction Chronicle.  March 31, 2011