Visible Amazement

After she and her beautiful, free-spirited single mother fall for the same man, Roanne Chappell, the feisty 14-year-old narrator of Garnett's exhilarating debut novel, realizes that she needs to leave home for the summer to gain a little breathing space. Heading south from Yachats, Ore., to California, she stops to visit famous cartoonist D.D.A., a kind, gay French-Canadian dwarf she looks to as a mentor. This first destination is unusual enough, but Roanne's travels take her to increasingly strange places, from the surreal home of her troubled friend Gabe, the son of two washed-up western stars-turned-evangelists, to beautiful, cold Malibu Colony, home of the cartoonist's gigantic and brooding brother Pascal, a talented photographer, and Gilbey Tarr, a gorgeous, openhearted, alcoholic 16-year-old nouveau riche heiress soon to become Roanne's best friend. Roanne's hunger-- her sheer adolescent greed--for life and love and connection and experience bring her some wonderful memories and relationships, but also a share of grown-up pain. Some readers may be taken aback by the frank discussion of her precocious relationships with a number of older men and her over-the-top adventures, but her character's sheer energy and intelligence make a little open-mindedness and suspension of disbelief worthwhile. The novel is told in the first person, in Roanne's own dialect, a wonderful combination of Canadian vernacular and resonant polysyllabics. At the close of this cunningly styled tale, a series of tragic happenings leaves Garnett's charming heroine--and the reader--with the bittersweet taste of life lessons honestly learned. Agent, Jan Whitford. (Mar. 7) Forecast: Though not as accomplished as Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here or Brian Hall's Saskiad, Visible Amazement will appeal to fans of similar unconventional teen-coming-of-age novels, and handselling to them could get cash registers ringing.