A Season of Dreams

Subtitled ``Coming of Age in Wyoming,'' this sophomoric first novel might better be targeted for YA males, but would remain a mediocre offering in that genre as well. After his father's death, Indiana high school football star Ken Rhodes and his mother are forced to move to his uncle's remote Wyoming farm. Still hoping for a football scholarship, Ken does not mix with his new classmates, except for ``Guppy'' Rieson, who drinks, smokes and conceals the sad truth of his family life by disrupting classes and spouting poetry at random. Hill tries to juxtapose the familiar teenage dream of sports fame with descriptions of the charms of rural life, but his turgid prose obviates success in either endeavor. Wooden dialogue is another problem, and so is his unappealing protagonist--Ken has an attitude problem, and he is is spoiled by his fundamentalist mother. A caricature of an English teacher gushes over Ken as a newfound prodigy, though the paper in question has been written by Guppy, whose literary brilliance surely would have been noticed by someone by the time he reached high school, even allowing for secretive teenage behavior. (Nov.)