Heartstones

The world of two young girls is threatened when an attractive young woman becomes engaged to their widowed father

YA The adolescent narrator of this novellette admires and emulates Poe's thrillers in this bizarre modern story which harks back to the 19th Century in style and setting. Elvira, 16, is anorexic, although that fact only slowly becomes obvious. She is also obsessed with her father and spends most of her time in their 15th-Century manse in intellectual pursuits for his approval. He, a lay theologian, has lost one wife to illness and loses his fiancee to an accident for which Elvira had wished and tried to plan, but in which she really had no hand. Her younger sister eats constantly and thinks the house is haunted. This is not a Stephen King spine chiller, but rather a close look at a psychological disaster within a family. Kids who enjoy Poe may enjoy this modern derivation, as well as the apparently first-hand insights into anorexia and obesity which show how oblivious the victim is to the illness. Thought-provoking, short reading. Dorcas Hand, Episcopal High School, Bellaire
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Less complex, less demanding than the full-scale novel, the novella still allows for greater character development than the short storyas the new "Harper's Short Novel" series will surely attest. At its best, as in Heartstones, the genre can deliver a potrait in miniature as incisive as it is affecting. Teenaged Elvira, precocious and self-dramatizing, loves her father obsessively, so much so that when her mother dies she abandons her "ordinary" younger sister to her own devices and plots to kill the fiancee that inevitably appears on the scene. Such is Rendell's mastery of psycholgoical suspense that throughout we remain unsure of the seriousness of Elvira's intentions. Rendell's is one of the series' three initial offerings, which include Colleen McCullogh's The Ladies of Missalonghi ( LJ 4/1/87) and Weldon's The Rules of Life . In Weldon's acidulous satirewhich, typically, skewers contemporary sex role expectationsa lay priest of the 21st century's Great New Ficitonal Religion seeks "the rules of life" by listening to the electronically recorded voices of re-winds (ghosts). Among them he finds Miss Gabriella Sumpter, vain and vainglorious seductress of the preceding century. Fans of Praxis ( LJ 11/1/78) and Puffball (LJ 9/1/80) will enjoy Weldon's wit; others may find it heavy-handed and eventually wearing. Though satire surely requires the puncturing of recognizable types, these far-too-predictable types have been done in before. Further, as types go, they are not very likable; when the priest, stuffy and censorious man that he is, eventually falls for Gabriella, we can't imagine why. Still, Weldon, like Rendell, is a popular writer; both these works will be in demand. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.