Tawni O'Dell's new novel, "Fragile Beasts" (Shaye Areheart Books, $25), follows the fate of two brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes struggling to survive in a rural Pennsylvania town where prospects are slim to none. The book opens with the death of their father, an event which threatens to tear them from the only home they've known. Kyle tells the story:

I hope he was drunk. I guess it's probably not the best thing for a kid to wish when his dad was out driving, but I don't care. If he was drunk, he was either happy or mad; he was either singing along with the country-western station while thinking about beer-commercial-caliber women and Klint's future, or he was scowling into the black night muttering about the latest injustice life had dealt him; but either way he wouldn't have realized what was coming.

People are finally starting to leave. I can hear their low voices outside my window and the crunch of gravel beneath their tires as they pull out of our driveway and away from the side of the road.

Red and blue lights flash on my wall for an instant as the state trooper starts up his cruiser. He told me earlier if Dad had been wearing his seat belt he might have lived, which to me was like saying if he'd been a foot taller he might have been a better basketball player.

He wouldn't tell me if he was drunk or not. He said it didn't matter, and I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, "It's the only thing that matters!" but I knew everyone in the room would look at me like I was crazy. Crazy with grief, they'd say, when all I am is sensible.

A creaking footstep stops outside my bedroom, and I close my eyes so whoever looks in on me will think I'm asleep.

The door opens. It shuts. The footsteps walk away.

I keep my eyes closed not because I'm tired but because everything in my room reminds me of Dad. We didn't have a lot in common; about the only interests we shared were hot wings and Klint. Most of the stuff I own I have in spite of him: my books, my four-foot-high erector set model of the Eiffel

Tower I built when I was eight and never dismantled, my art supplies and sketch pads, all my drawings and paintings in various stages of completeness scattered everywhere, all the cool rocks, bird feathers, dead bugs, dried leaves, bones, and pieces of broken glass I've collected on my treks through the woods that Dad called my "nature crap," and my set of Van Gogh playing cards I got on a seventh-grade field trip to the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh.

Everything in this room belonged to a kid with a dad, and those things are still here and he isn't. I had a dad this morning. I had a dad four hours ago.

How can someone be gone just like that?

He had plans. This is the thing I can't stop thinking about. They weren't big plans. Nothing ambitious or complicated or admirable. Definitely not anything that could ever be considered a goal. His needs were simple, and his desires even simpler.

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