WHERE DOES THE SUMMER GO?

...in Learning about Life, and even though Freddy, fifteen, going on sixteen, is back in the same house on Long Island with the same people (her family--Mama and Papa and Grandma and Mama's disconcertingly defiant sister Louise; and next door, her oldest friends Karen and David) everything has changed. David is at first pretty superior; he's nineteen and he's been going out with older girls (who for some reason our Freddy refers to as older women) but then he falls in love with her, the new her, with more ""mature"" thoughts. Then at home there are all these insolent intimations Louise tosses off, confirmed when she finds Louise and Papa in a compromising kiss so that Freddy has to revise her ideas of growing up and adjust to its ""penalty""--imperfection. Yes, everything has changed, and the same people are different--and while this deals with a kind of emotional ectoplasm which is difficult to finger without its sticking, it is, on the whole, nicely done and certainly girls of this age will read it and respond. Avidly.