Book excerpt: These stories take place in an upscale suburb of Portland, Oregon, and explore what the American dream means to twenty-first-century suburbanites. In a city where the homecoming queen still makes the front page of the weekly newspaper, ducks caught in storm drains and stolen campaign signs make up the bulk of the crime reports in the paper's police blotter. Underneath, though, are complexities that rival those of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Each of the stories begins with an entry from the newspaper's police blotter. Elissa Minor Rust fills in the background to these small, odd events-a headless parakeet found in mailbox, a nude jogger, an alarmingly deathlike discarded teddy bear. Her stories, both humorous and disturbing, dive beneath the clear, hard surface of a community into the murky complexities that swirl beneath. The lake at the center of town is a constant in the lives of this town's people, and it appears and reappears throughout the book as a symbol of wealth and power, of love and loss. The Prisoner Pear offers a rare look inside the heart of middle- and upper-class suburbia. Reading these stories is, as one character observes, " . . .like seeing the town from the inside out, as if the lake was its heart and the rest merely its bones and skin."