A Whistling Woman

In her second novel, following by a decade her memorable Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail , Shivers again demonstrates her talent for taking a familiar plot line and imbuing it with evocative and stark prose and unforgettable characters. She returns to the South, this time shortly after the end of the Civil War when Chaney and her eight-year-old daughter Georgeanna go to live and work on a rundown North Carolina plantation. Though the old, addled owner is kind and the black farmhand couple wise, Georgeanna is troubled by her mother's reluctance to talk about the past, by her own recurring nightmares and, when she becomes a teenager, by the strange feelings that young womanhood brings, especially when ``Doll,'' the plantation's 35-year-old (married) heir begins to pay attention to her. Their brief romantic interlude leads to an illegitimate child when Georgeanna is 15. Protecting Georgeanna, Chaney lets everyone believe the infant is hers, setting in motion many of the book's ensuing dramatic events, including a deathbed confession that, while horrific, is anticlimactic. The novel never quite reaches the intensity and powerful emotional pitch of Baby . Without much passion driving the unfolding scenes, Georgeanna narrates the story in flashback, offering simplistic comments about life's vicissitudes. Though emotionally affecting and very good reading, A Whistling Woman lacks the dramatic strength of Shivers's first book,which Longstreet is simultaneously reissuing in paperback. 20,000 first printing; author tour. (Oct.)