TITANIA'S LODESTONE

Wish on a lodestone and you still couldn't come up with a more romantic set-up for a tenth grader. Priscilla returns from years in Europe, mostly Finland, with her long-haired father and her mother Titania -- who looks like a princess in her embroidered peasant clothes and acts like a witch who's discovered transcendental meditation. Sooner than you can say abracadabra, Mom and Dad (or in this case Titania and Paul) have transformed the ruins of an old mansion into a home (foam rubber covered rocks make comfortable chairs, etc.) and Priscilla has acquired a beautiful stray Afghan hound. The catch is that Priscilla wants desperately to be a real American, and her second hand notions of what Americans are really like only complicate the family's attempt to win some sort of acceptance from their Yankee neighbors. Underneath their forced exoticism Priscilla's family are nice people, as are so many of the Massachusetts folk they meet, and the tendency to poke fun at the stateside yahoos is restrained. Fizzy nonconformity.