Whenever I read a newspaper article or see a TV news magazine segment about the accidental death of a child, I'm saddened and weirdly enthralled. It's not the tragedy of a life cut short that stays in my mind. Instead, I'm haunted by what the parents are going through. Are they blaming themselves? Will they ever be able to live a normal life?

In her novel A Boy in Winter, Maxine Chernoff not only examines a parent's grief over a child's death, but she throws in several complications that make the book more then just a cautionary case study. Ten-year-old Eddie Nova is a difficult, hyperactive child who, one fateful afternoon, visits his friend and neighbor Danny. Eddie brings the new compound hunting bow his father has bought him and begins pointing the bow and arrow at Danny and at Danny's dog until, angry at Eddie's irresponsibility, Danny grabs the bow away. In hot-headed retaliation, he points it at Eddie. The arrow accidentally fires, hitting Eddie in the chest and killing him instantly.

Eddie's death is already in the past when the novel opens, but it replays in the minds of several characters as they try to understand exactly what happened and why. Chernoff tells the story in three sections and three different points of view-first Danny's divorced mother Nancy, then Danny, and finally Eddie's father Frank, who was having an affair with Nancy before the accident.

The most affecting section is Nancy's, told in brief, first-person chapters that examine her close bond to Danny, who is now in a boy's facility for observation, and the loneliness that led her into Frank's arms. Chernoff wisely builds this section as a series of snapshots from Nancy's pre- and post-accident life, creating the portrait of a woman whose emotions are paradoxically overwhelming and distanced. Nancy makes greeting card graphics for a living and now, after all that has happened, sees herself as a fraud. "I feel my fraudulence," she says, "and wonder, will I ever be happy enough to repress it again? Will life allow me this necessary treason?"

The second section of the novel is told in Danny's voice as he reconstructs the events that led up to Eddie's death. At the suggestion of his doctors, Danny writes about how he met Eddie and how Eddie became both friend and annoyance. Here Chernoff allows the reader to begin filling in the pieces of Nancy's story by seeing Frank and Nancy's affair from Danny's point of view. As Frank grows closer to Nancy, he begins to include Danny in his father-son outings with Eddie--including a deer hunting trip to Wisconsin for which Danny and Eddie have to take a bow hunting safety class.

At one point, Danny realizes how much he misses not having a father and how unfair it is that Eddie has Frank, who Danny thinks deserves a better son. Chernoff handles Danny's voice deftly, getting just the right mix of naiveté, pain, and wisdom:

"At times like this I wish I had a dad because my mom doesn't want me to tell her the real sad things I sometimes think about...I think dads don't care as much if you're sad about something. Maybe it's because they love you even more. Or maybe they love you less. I can't decide."

Chernoff, who is an accomplished poet as well as a fiction writer, has a spare, precise prose style that provides a needed balance to the emotional subject matter and yet manages to give Nancy and Danny distinct voices. However, when the novel moves into the third person in its final section, alternating between Frank and Nancy's points of view, I found myself less engaged. Frank's bizarre behavior, while not even fully understandable to himself, could have been better prepared for earlier in the novel. There were also a few other significant events, like Frank's bond with Nancy's friend Riley, which seemed to appear out of nowhere and left me unsatisfied.

A Boy in Winter is a novel with a great deal of merit that just misses making a jump into the realm of the truly memorable. Maxine Chernoff skillfully charts the nuances of loss, guilt, love, and redemption, and creates a portrait of lives made desperate and bleak by a devastating accidental moment. Yet despite the sadness, Chernoff brings Nancy, Frank, Danny, and the reader to a shaky kind of hope.