Summer Hawk

Savage (Under a Different Sky) paints a convincing portrait of her teenage heroine, a city girl ""exiled"" to a backwoods community, but overdoes the other players in this sometimes florid contemporary drama. Taylor's sculptor father is supposedly perceptive (""He could look into people.... As if he could see the shape of their deepest dreams.... He chisels right past the outside, straight into [people's] hearts""). But, having dismissed his family's misgivings about leaving Philadelphia for Hunter's Gap, his home town, he neglects wife and daughter while he becomes engrossed in his art. Taylor's mother is a workaholic career woman (a psychoanalyst, she is labeled ""psychopath"" by the locals), and she is too cold to elicit much sympathy--even though her complaints about the narrow-mindedness of Hunter's Gap citizens are amply confirmed by Taylor's first-person narration. Another key figure, ""the hawk lady,"" a biology professor who helps save a fledgling, becomes a mother figure for Taylor, but she also has an affair with Taylor's father; she is too self-consciously tragic, as is Taylor's first boyfriend, Rail, the son of a shell-shocked Vietnam vet. The most involving (and least melodramatic) aspect of this novel is Taylor's immediate dilemma. Should she attend the prestigious boarding school her mother graduated from or stay in Hunter's Gap and adopt her father's more relaxed approach to education? Although the author works hard to convey both sides of the argument, her bias is as obvious as the line she draws between rednecks and progressives. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)