Sexing the Cherry

Reworked fairy tales, 17th-century England and present-day London are integrated in this eccentric, boundary-forsaking plunge through time and space. ``Graced with striking similes and poetic cadences, the author's prose is clean and strong,'' said PW , but its finer qualities are ``insufficient to redeem its overwrought artifice . . . and stridently dogmatic feminism.'' (Mar.)