IN THE LANGUAGE OF LOONS

From Kinsey-Warnock (As Long as There Are Mountains, p. 875, etc.), a short novel about growing up that opens at the end of the school year in 1969 and closes the next spring. Arlis, 12, is relieved to be away from home, where, during a field trip, he stripped to his underwear to wallow in mud like a pig, was urinated on by classmates, and tricked into eating a worm sandwich. At his grandparents' Vermont farm for the summer, Arlis warms to his grandfather, who teaches Arlis about the call of the loons during a fishing trip. Arlis's carelessness with a fishing line leads to a loon's death; when the elderly man encourages Arlis to take up running, he tries, quits, tries again, then easily makes the cross-country team, turns a tormentor into a friend, reconciles with his father, who goes in a few pages from an overworked lawyer to a runner who sings in the choir. In a final contrivance from which Arlis emerges a hero, he drives his mother through snowstorm to the hospital where she gives birth. Kinsey-Warnock trivializes life-and-death events with more prosaic material; in the meantime, pieces of plot remain undeveloped, e.g., an essay, mentioned only when Arlis is assigned it, and when he turns it in, is greeted with ``This is good, Arlis. Very good. I didn't know you could write like this.'' Every chapter contains emotional scenes or rhapsodic passages on nature, but they are glued on rather than transpiring naturally in the story. (Fiction. 10-12)