THE TURTLE STREET TRADING CO.; TURTLES TOGETHER FOREVER

A queer pair for joint publication. The Turtle Street Trading Co. could be the pilot for a new after-school sitcom: four twelve-year-old stereotypes from Turtle Street in a Southern California suburb--big-wheel Morgan S. Pierpoint III, fat, bespectacled Fergy Weintraub, distaff-John-Wayne P.J. (Priscilla Jane) Alberoy, and extra-nice/not-sobright Mikey McGrath--set themselves up in the business of trading kids' junk, ata commission, for other kids' junk. Morgan has a funny run-in with a mother who questions his valuation of her daughter's doll, and the first day's business is disappointing; but celebrity mogul-dom is in quick sight--thanks to a puff-piece by Morgan's journalist mother and the TV interview it triggers. Meanwhile P.J.'s mother has coerced her into frilly dresses (otherwise, no Trading Co.) and Morgan's thumb-sucking eight-year-old brother has cajoled himself into full partnership. The one situation with something going for it, in real-life terms, is Fergy's: a fond but irresponsible divorced father. And, in Turtles Together Forever!, Fergy is reclaimed by his San Francisco lawyer mother. What follows is hot one of juvenile fiction's memorable adjustment dramas--but it certainly beats the inanities of the first book. Fergy, at first hostile toward his ruade-over mother, her health-food diet, and her private-school plans for him, does come to see that his father is an overgrown kid and imperfect too. He acquires a simpatico friend in also-brainy, also-decent Joey Tew next door. And his Turtle Street business spin-off is not another trading company, as intended, but--with many more specifics--a homemade, high-quality ice cream, Fergy's 15 Famous Flavors. Together: promising on aecount of the business angle, iffy on account of the cloddish set-up.