The Catalogue of the Universe

Beautiful Angela May lives a rather eccentric life with her mother in a small house at the top of Dry Creek Road. All her life she has heard that she was a child of love, but that her father was married and could not leave his other family. Now she's determined to meet him. Her best friend, Tycho Potter, doesn't think it's a good idea. In many ways he's a romantic and mystical person, but watching his sister's marriage fall apart has made him skeptical about Angela's faith in the power of love. Although things are predictably awful when Angela faces her father, out of this experience comes a new romance with Tycho and a better understanding of herself. This fairly straightforward story is overlaid with metaphysical musings that Angela and Tycho cull from old novels and Ionian philosophy. There are moments of lyrical intensity when the everyday is transformed by this spiritual element, but the two themes do not completely gel. (14-up)