Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

Hood has written a provocative, uneven tale of three women who were flower-child friends at an unnamed New England college in the late 1960s. Suzanne eventually reverts to a life of which her parents would approveearning an M.B.A., becoming an investment banker, avoiding her past and old friends, and refusing to tell her daughter, Sparrow, about Sparrow's father, Abel, a poet who lives in a house on the coast of Maine. Claudia is semicatatonic following the accidental drowning of her oldest son in the mid-'70s. And Elizabeth, who lives with her potter husband and their children, suffers a bout with cancer. This is also the story of the women's children, particularly of Sparrow's efforts to learn about her father and the love of Claudia's oldest son for Rebekah, Elizabeth's daughter. The narrative is at times rickety and self-conscious, and Hood often seems afraid to take risks with her characters' lives and motivationstoo often a single, extraordinary event rigidly determines their personality forever after. Nonetheless, this is an intriguing work by an author of promise. (July)