By the Shore

In the first-person voice of a 12-year-old English girl, British actress (David Lynch's Nadja; Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives) and debut author Craze fashions a spare, beautifully evocative tale of love and the youthful need for belonging. May, her six-year-old half brother, Eden, and their unconventional but loving single mother, Lucy, have moved out of London to turn an old girls' school on the coast into a bed-and-breakfast. Accustomed to Lucy's erratic behavior and the shenanigans of her mother's drug-culture friends, May craves merely to be regarded as ""a girl from a safe home,"" to fit in with the other girls at school. As the Christmas holidays approach, only one boarder comes to stay, a mysterious writer named Rufus, aided by his pretty, hip publishing assistant and sometime lover, Patricia. In light, deft strokes, Craze delineates the delicate balance of need and hurt in the lives of her characters. May quietly and subversively wounds her mother while trying to keep her father's influence alive; Lucy's fragile emotional state results in often clumsy maternal care; Rufus makes halting attempts to reach out for intimacy. Through a series of tender epiphanies, the budding romance between Rufus and Lucy is skillfully juxtaposed with May's incipient awareness of the adult world of sex and desire. Before May even realizes that her rou father has arrived, she notices a familiar odor in the house: ""I have secretly searched for it in other people's houses, locking the bathroom door, smelling all the soaps and things in bottles."" While the plot is so simple as to be predictable, Craze's seemingly effortless touch renders it remarkable and moving. (May)