SILVERPOINT

As she turns 12, Cora finds it increasingly hard to believe that her father, who returned to Greece before she was born, has never communicated with her. Suddenly, reading portents in the ramblings of the street people she and her best friend Charley like to interview, she's sure he's coming. Haunted by dreams in which her hopes are translated into variations on the myth of Europa; disturbed by finding her mother's letters to her father, plus one from him to Cora about which she was never told; discovering that Charley, whom she has always believed to be a straightforward fount of interesting facts, is also deeply distressed by the loss of his father (who died of a brain tumor)- -Cora's image of her father is already being transformed before he turns up in the book's last pages to complete the transformation with a disappointing reality. The events are sparse in this carefully structured, beautifully written story, but Cora's inner life is fascinating, rich with interconnected leitmotifs—jump-rope rhymes, angels and madmen, science and magic, ideas within ideas (such as the clairvoyant ``Lady Moon'' born with ``three veils''). It's a story that, like Paterson's Park's Quest (1988), makes a mother's pain at being abandoned comprehensible without losing focus on its effect on her child; meanwhile, Geringer creates a protagonist of integrity who is assimilating difficult facts about her past while becoming more sensitively attuned to her mother and closest friend. An unusually fine first novel. (Fiction. 10-14)