Someone Special

The sure-handed Saxton (First Love, Last Love) serves up more catnip for Anglophiles in this restrained melodrama, which traces the lives of three English women from their shared birthday in 1926 through the 1930s Depression, WWII and the 1950s postwar boom. Princess Elizabeth, who will become Queen Elizabeth II, is given a royal rearing under the loving tutelage of her nanny; plain, intelligent Anna is born to upper-class Constance, whose privileged society life doesn't compensate for her husband's philandering; and Nell grows up as the daughter of working-class Hester Coburn, who runs away from her post as a servant and becomes a snake charmer at a fair. The most vivid of the three portrayals belongs to Hester and Nell and is enlivened by the carnival setting (where Nell barks for her mother) and by a family conflict involving a powerful landowner. Least successful is the standoffish depiction of the Royals-stiff to the point of solidity. The theme of specialness is belabored, and readers less taken with the sheer Englishness of it all may find the overexplained inner landscapes to be stuffy and ponderous. But Saxton's command of her bustling backdrop renders this an engaging, if uninspired, chronicle of two generations of three social classes. (July)