Not a Swan

Ah, there'll always be an England . . . and English girls' fiction. Rose is 17 in the summer of 1944, when her widowed mother goes overseas to entertain the troops and sends Rose and her two older sisters to a cottage in the country. But at the last minute their chaperone, Miss Hutchinson, gets drafted by the Land Army, and the three young women decide to brave it alone. Naive only by contemporary standards, Rose learns about sex and about love--in that order. Another discovery consists of the secret diaries left by the cottage's now-deceased last tenant, known to all as Mad Hilda, whose life story fuels Rose's longstanding ambition to be a writer. The rotters here abuse others' trust or mistake conventional notions of propriety for integrity; the good eggs, like Rose, hone and hew to their own heartfelt principles. Everyone receives just deserts in a terribly tidy ending. This long, cozy novel won't win any awards for realism, but no matter. Its plucky, just-short-of-perfect heroine, its preoccupation with honor and its romantic plot constitute a classic mix. Ages 12-up. (Aug.)