Heat Lightning

In what seems an explosion of literary creativity, Cohen, whose provocative nonfiction book Glass, Paper, Beans appeared in February (following the memorable 1993 Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World), has written a haunting first novel that exquisitely captures the perceptions of a young girl on the verge of puberty. Narrator Mole (for Martha) and her older sister, Tilly, were babies when their parents died trying to rescue boaters in a storm. They were adopted by their loving but taciturn Aunt Hy, who has told them very little of the circumstances in which their parents drowned, so that the girls, closely bonded by their situation, have added details to create their own story about that night. During an oppressively hot summer when the girls are 11 and 12, their carefully constructed version of the world begins to crack. Hy rents the empty house where the girls were born (they call it ""the dead house"") to the Rouens, married marine biologists who, with their four children, have come to the area to study mussels. Outwardly appealing, the family is subtly dysfunctional. Tilly, suddenly crossing the bridge to adolescence, is drawn to 14-year-old Walter Rouen, even as his father attempts to seduce her. Her burgeoning sexuality loosens her sibling bond, and Mole is hurt, lonely and abandoned, as well as bewildered by adult behavior. ""No grown-up around me offered any clear message or instruction,"" she mourns in a premonitory passage. Cohen delicately conveys the uncertainty and moodiness of young girls on the verge of puberty. Her sensuous language bursts with charged imagery, as do her descriptions of a rural hamlet whose apparent summertime languor hides simmering emotions. So suspensefully does her story move along that one is somewhat disappointed at the end to find no closure to the events that Mole has been foreshadowing with plaintive gloom. That a small revelation at the end apparently satisfies their natural desire for knowledge about their parents conveys the message that deprivation of their past is somehow no longer important to the sisters. But if Mole doesn't learn much about her past, she does begin to understand her future, and the reader hopes to share more of her life. 25,000 first printing; author tour. (July)