The heroine of last year's Marathon Miranda is still running, but her friend Phoebe has shifted her interest to a boy she begins to meet on the sly. Miranda is troubled by her friend's demands that Miranda lie to Phoebe's strict parents; and she is even more troubled when her own brother Alex fakes friendship with Michael Oliver, a rather pathetic new acquaintance of Miranda's, so he can observe him for a psychology class report. While struggling to do the right thing in both these situations, Miranda also has to cope with a left-out feeling when her grandfather and her older friend Margaret, who met in the previous book, announce plans to marry. None of this is momentous, but Winthrop handles Miranda's problems sympathetically and brings them together smoothly if not synergistically.