BELONGING

Except for the fact that what keeps 15-year-old Meg an ""outsider"" is her white cane and books in Braille, this fictionalized autobiography is depressingly like all those Fifties-vintage quests for popularity. Desperate to be in with the in-crowd at Ridge View High, Meg shafts her new friends--""uncool"" Lindy and Keith, an oddball opera buff--in order to attend a Friday night gathering of the elite. However, a stint as wallflower at the (mini)orgy convinces Meg to stick with her good buddies. And ultimately they show what a supposedly sharp, free-thinking trio they are by writing a scathing editorial in their school lit mag denouncing the firing of Miss Kellogg. That their conventionally unconventional English teacher (Miss K touts Thoreau instead of grammar) turns out to be clearly unhinged with raving paranoid delusions is never sufficiently explored and the author intends us to see Ridge View High as a fairly insidious repressive institution when actually it just seems caught up with the usual Mickey-Mouse rules and regulations. Although Kent can be incisive about the thousand-and-one niggling resentments and embarrassments that are part and parcel of being blind, overall her views of conformity seem not so much purposeful ambiguity as plain muddled thinking.