ADAM'S DAUGHTERS

Who will get love-everlasting with Tony Bain, young prince of the New Architecture? Will the lucky girl be luscious Julia, Broadway and TV actress, or her brilliant sister Cordelia, a fledgling architect who's lanky but gorgeous? That's the thin suspense here--as Villars (The Very Best People, etc.) has Cordelia, Julia, and Tony each tell his or her story in turn. Julia and Cordelia are daughters of Adam Kirkland, an F. L. Wright type of architecture pioneer. So, when impudent, original Tony becomes Adam's protÉgÉ, he finds a kindred spirit in Cordelia: rising to the top in Adam's firm, the two architects marry. But did Tony propose to Cordelia only because Julia inexplicably married dreadful, famous anchorman Webster Warren? Another source of marital tension: wicked Adam urges both Tony and Cordelia to enter a Japanese competition; Cordelia edges out Tony and is spending chunks of time in Japan. Meanwhile Julia's a splash on Broadway, shedding hubby Webster; Tony's lonely, Julia's delicious, and before long. . . Cordelia insists on divorce--while Tony and Adam fight over architectural approaches. (Total planning vs. individual ""pride and power."") Worse yet, the sisters get into the conflict when there are plans to destroy the famous Sarah Siddons theater to make way for another of Adam's pride-and-power masterworks. Cordelia, besotted with father worship, accepts a sparkler from millionaire developer Graham Fowler, who offers her an island of her own to develop; both sisters star in a Sarah Siddons heating. But it's Adam's last mighty gesture, together with an old family secret and feelings sorted out, which brings the appropriate lovers together. A tad of modern-architecture substance--but mainly this is a gimcrack romance without the champagne glamour of Villars' Newport posheries.