Poised at the end of the diving board of puberty and looking down at the water, Alison is a thoughtful and caring girl trying to get the world around her to make some kind of sense-but not even a good girl can find much to buy amongst the shoddy wares the adult culture seems to be selling. Especially when she's surrounded by mean girls like Claire and Tina and stoner boys like Fat Mike and Ninja Dave.

Even a "good" high school can feel like purgatory, with hormones and insecurities flying all over the place, and Jerry Sander has ripped the sugarcoating from the myth of jovial good will and academic striving. Who are the adult guides who will shepherd these young souls past the rocky shoals? Some are just marking time, some are liars, some are outright scoundrels, and even the better ones struggle ceaselessly with bureaucracy and disillusionment. The well-intended efforts-the counseling, the field trips to historic sites-too often fall pathetically short of touching these kids anywhere near where they live.

It's hard to imagine how it could be otherwise, when where they live isjam-packed with sex (or unfulfilled yearnings for sex), drugs, and violence. Meanwhile, the adults who fight a losing battle to keep their kids in a squeaky-clean cocoon are busy lusting, tippling, and conniving, at least as lost in self-pity as their charges. Behind it all is a splashily painted backdrop of Modern America: radio talk-show hosts, Cosmopolitan cover stories, religious fanaticism, and rock'n'roll.

Sander juggles interlocking plot lines as the girls and the boys (and their elders) strive for supremacy and dance on the fine edge of felony, taking us from the halls to the mall, the nighttime streets, and suburban split-levels and group homes to illustrate how everyone's privacy struggles and hidden agendas impact everyone else. He has an empathy for teenagers that makes even the most misguided among them seem comprehensible, as well as a feel for the ways in which a moment's impulse can resonate outwards like ripples on a dark pond.

It sounds bleak, perhaps, but it's hilarious and full of love. Alison's budding, innocent, and misunderstood romance with the adorable new guy proves stronger than the machinations of Claire and her crew-and the more we understand what drives Claire's behavior, the more we feel for her.

The kids, after all, are but heirs to the racism, commercialism, denial, and anger that run rampant through modern life. They didn't ask for all this, but they're stuck with it. And all too often, trying to be the Biggest, Baddest, and Best lands them in ever deeper soup.

There's a pedophile priest, a super-slick lawyer, a psychologist who believes that everyone's problems can be solved by the right nutrition; a crooked, sex-starved administrator, and a drunken bigot sitting just outside, getting lost in progressively darker dreams. There's also a slick young thug from the city who entices an adventurous but decent lad into a walk on the wild side, and a boy with a hopeless crush on the foxy art teacher (though a hopeless crush in the third millennium translates into condoms in the backpack).

It's a huge slice of life, and there are inevitably a few loose ends, but not enough to be annoying. First-time novelist Sander certainly knows his terrain. A high school guidance counselor from the Mid-Hudson Valley, where Permission Slips is set, he does an admirable job of wrapping his insights into a package of revelation.

In his highly acclaimed 2000 book, Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia, George Crane recounted a 1996 trip with his Ulster County neighbor and friend Tsung Tsai, possibly the world's last Ch'an (Chinese Zen Buddhism) monk to the Gobi Desert. There they hoped to find and cremate the remains of Tsung Tsai's master, who was murdered in 1959 during China's Great Leap Forward. The only monk in his monastery to survive the Red Army's brutality, Tsung Tsai walked across China to Hong Kong, where he arrived nearly dead from starvation, in hopes of preserving his Buddhist master's teachings for future generations. Nearly 40 years later, Tsung Tsai returned to Inner Mongolia with Crane, a sometime spiritual seeker and then-unpublished writer. In the Gobi, the two men managed to find Tsung Tsai's master's destroyed monastery and grave, but not to recover his bones. Instead, they discovered an unlikely friendship, born of compassion and a shared sense of humor, as the thoroughly Western Crane struggled to comprehend the thoroughly Eastern Tsung Tsai's "monk mind," making Bones, among many other things, a "buddy book."

Like all buddies from time to time, Crane and Tsung Tsai grow tired of each other after the opening chapters of Bones's sequel, Beyond the House of the False Lama. The story begins in late September 2001—the events of 9/11 never mentioned but somehow eerily present in a sudden snow flurry Tsung Tsai pronounces "false winter"—with Crane once again receiving life lessons delivered in Tsung Tsai's charmingly broken Yoda-like syntax. Pressured by his impending divorce and bankruptcy, as well as his publisher's demanding a second book, Crane is anxious to return to Mongolia, but Tsung Tsai, caught up with poetry, a mysterious math project, and the problems of old age, no longer wants to go.

So by spring of 2002, Crane, a self-styled free spirit who's "happy only in flux—always dissatisfied, always going or coming back from somewhere," says good-bye to Tsung Tsai and begins his own journey. Without Tsung Tsai, and with a heavily broken heart, Crane decides to travel as if he were "some Zen monk"—the Chinese epigram for which, he notes, translates as "wandering boy"—"albeit a broken one."

Crane's searches—for adventure, love, faith, emotional healing, and proof that he really is a writer—take him first to Key Largo, where he joins an eccentric crew delivering a 58-foot sailboat to Grenada through hurricane season. After a strange interlude back home, Crane moves to Paris and tries to write as he waits out the Mongolian winter and watches as the war on Iraq begins and the world stands by in ultimately pointless protest.

Finally, Crane reaches Mongolia, where he discovers not the remains of Tsung Tsai's master, but what the nomads call "the beginning of the wind," as well as another lost temple; Australian Buddhist nun Ani Jinpa and her orphanage; the cliffs of Delgaz Khaan; the friendship of his guide Jumaand; an affair with a young Mongol girl, Uka; and at last, a chance to grieve his father's death and to accept his own "peasant...born anarchist" self—"a Russian Jew with a bit of Mongol mixed in, one of the homeless ones."

No less riveting and moving than his first book, Crane's second offering is a rich pastiche. Written by the most eloquent, most lyrical of wanderers, Beyond the House of the False Lama is filled with stories, characters, mythology, history, soul-searching, poetry, memoir, travelogue, and all things experienced within the most recent span of Crane's life, what he calls "this wild rush through obscurity."

The North Country, as residents call the Adirondacks, is a spare, rugged place where winter comes early and leaves late. Though less than a day's drive from some of the largest cities in the east, it's a wedge of deeply wild geography that houses the largest park in the continental US.

This is the world inhabited by the Hazens, descendants of the first settlers to carve homes in the edge-of-the-wilderness town known as Lost Lake. These pioneering ancestors would recognize much about the way the contemporary Hazen family lives. They grow their own food, cut the wood that heats their home, and shoot nearly all the meat they eat.

Most would call this a hardscrabble existence, but to Gary Hazen, it's simply the way North Country life should be lived. His drive and narrow focus are what makes this lifestyle work, but it's also the wedge that's cleaving a widening gap between him and his two sons. Though they're young adults, the family's closely teamed survival strategy has kept them living at home. But there is no room in the Hazen household for independent ways of thinking, and the story begins at the inevitable point of untenable strain.

The younger son Kevin has already begun to step out of his father's firmly scribed circle by enrolling in a local college and taking up with a city girl. He has bigger plans for his life than Gary can imagine, but lacks the guts to tell his father. Even the "good son," Gary David, has begun to push away; he's fallen for Gary's nemesis, Josephine Roy, the new, overachieving environmental conservation officer who suspects (rightly) that Gary's in the habit of taking more deer than legally allowed.

The opening day of rifle season is the focal point of the dramatic bull's-eye. To Gary, this day means a cherished woodland union with his sons. To his wife, Susan, it's a day spent finding ways to distract herself from fears for her family's safety. To Officer Roy, it's a day of hard work, and to poacher Lamey Pierson, it's the day he'll exact long-awaited revenge on Gary.

Bailey's depiction of the Adirondack soul is masterful. His prose resonates like the voice of the land itself, echoing with the crack of breaking ice and the forlorn cries of Canada geese. His style embodies the harsh justice of a northern climate, and his insight into this family's dynamic is just as effective.

The lives of the characters swirl toward the tragic climax like water caught in the pull of a drain. There is ample evidence from the start of the tale that something terrible is coming, but when it finally arrives, it's no less heartbreaking for the expectation.

The story is told from a large variety of viewpoints, a technique that lends it a sort of "Our Town" dimensionality. And though The Grace That Keeps This World is an episodic, well-paced tale, dramatic action isn't its real purpose. This is a tale of a family come undone, drawn by author Tom Bailey from a newspaper account of a real-life tragedy.

The local eatery in Lost Lake runs a betting pool about the day the first deep snow will come. Gary Hazen puts a five-spot on the opening day of hunting season, and to his enormous ultimate misfortune, he is right. This is a story of small victories and large losses, the creative and destructive powers of love, and the ways in which we all struggle to do what we think is the next right thing.