The Chosen Ones

This British import is as bland and trivial as its main characters, five young women who have become ``close as sisters'' while rooming together at Lorivals, a boarding school in rural Lancashire catering to the elite or ``chosen ones.'' At graduation, one of the girls, placid Lady Amelia Urquart, suggests the group reunite in 10 years, no matter what. The others agree; they are Barbara Smythe, snobbish and spiteful; working-class Maisie Jayson; worldly Lois Brampton; and narrator Nancy Graham, head girl at Lorivals. Hylton ( Summer of the Flamingoes ) lurches from one setting to another--the English countryside, London, the Far East--as she homes in on Nancy's fortunes throughout the decade. Working first as a small-town journalist and then for a firm trading in unspecified ``Oriental treasures,'' Nancy conducts a series of ill-advised affairs, with repercussions that disquiet Amelia and undo Lois. At best, the protagonists are insipid, the prose hackneyed (``At night in the velvet dark Hong Kong sparkled like a gigantic diamond'') and the ballyhooed reunion at novel's end not worth the wait. (June)