Pockets of self-discovery

As she struggles to learn the game, Byer discovers a competitive spirit she didn't know she had; she learns to control her anger and her fear in a tense match; she realizes that she is lonely, sexy, flawed, frightened, more empathetic and trustworthy than she imagined. Her transformation from a painfully bored executive to a mysterious, messy and powerful woman stalking a pool table is irresistible. Byer manages her new life with aplomb; she shows up at work each morning and strolls into the pool hall each night.

Pool's a game Byer doesn't master quickly, and she's not accustomed to failure. "I've been conditioned to excel in the classroom and the boardroom; to speak in long, forceful, articulate sentences; to hold my own in high-pressure jobs with demanding bosses," she writes. "But this poise deflated like a punctured balloon when I walked into my first poolroom."

Although the narrator is in her 30s, "Sweet" reads like a tender coming-of-age story, complete with awkward phases and conflicted epiphanies. (At Blatt Billiards, Byer picks out her first pool cue in a scene that has all the snap and fairy-tale ring of Harry Potter selecting a new magic wand. "It's you," her companion tells her.) Byer is not a great pool player: She loses and loses, she rails and throws fits, she finds instructors who teach her strategies and every so often she wins. She has doomed amorous relations with other players; she changes jobs and neighborhoods; she makes fast friends; she feels desirable one day and defeated the next; she loses her dignity; she wins it back. Byer goes from frightened beginner to swaggering middle-skill player who recites "the billiard equivalent of a Hail Mary" before taking a shot, and her league rank goes up and down in a series of pulse-pounding matches in which she squares off with players who are bigger, better and cockier. (Men and women play one another, but according to long-established rules a woman's rank automatically begins lower than a man's.)

Although the narrative is full of well-observed nuance and peppered with true wit, Byer occasionally employs what seem like cinematic tricks that undercut her storytelling gifts. The opening scene feels too much like a "Sopranos" episode, and Byer's close friend Alison resembles the confidant in romantic comedies who helps the heroine sort out the inevitable foibles of her charmed life. Readers will prefer the "dark world" of the poolroom, "where a guy who looks at you wrong gets smacked and the smacker gets tossed onto a city sidewalk." Although she is wonderfully empathetic in her descriptions of the people she befriends -- even the one who arrives at a bar covered in vomit after a disastrous alcoholic binge -- Byer's attempt to include everyone in her cast of characters sometimes feels too scripted.