Teen Angel and Other Stories of Young Love

These warm, insightful stories portray adolescents at touching moments of infatuation, awareness and recognition of the many guises of love. In the title story, Jennifer, from a tidy beige home, is dazzled by the free-flowing emotions of her friend Becky's family and the consuming love and secret wedding of Becky's restless, frankly sexual sister; Claire, in ``Wearing Glasses,'' sees in her parents' separation that love is not always clear and definite and that sometimes one denies something vital about oneself to please another; ``Camouflage'' movingly recounts the love and grief of a 16-year-old giving up her out-of-wedlock baby and then her brightening hope for the future; and in ``Magic Circle,'' Dobie realizes, in his father's infidelity in the family Volvo, and in his own sexual encounter in the same car, the impermanence of love. Gingher (Bobby Rex's Greatest Hit) has provided the reader with a gift of closely observed, deeply felt stories that shimmer with truth. (June)