ANOTHER KIND OF MONDAY

In this arty, open-ended tale, Coles (with Stephen Schwandt, Funnybone, 1992) writes notes to his own characters, leading them on a treasure hunt through Pittsburgh's history as well as some of its unsavory neighborhoods. In an old library copy of Dickens's Great Expectations, high school senior Mark Bettors finds three crisp $100 bills and a letter that, in grandiloquent, allusion-spattered language, invites him to undertake a quest for a great, though unspecified, reward. For his one companion, he chooses Zeena Curry, a classmate with a white father, a black mother, and a big chip on her shoulder. Except that they are both rude, disagreeable sorts (especially to their parents), the two seem to have little in common, but they make the effort to work together, in the library (Mark ``hated librarians. They always acted like you were stupid for not knowing things'') and at a series of historical sites. Predictably, Mark and Zeena become close; they learn in a final letter that their treasure is the realization that everyone has a personal, self- created story. Students of Pittsburgh's past might enjoy the itinerary, but many books—Julian Thompson's Herb Seasoning (1990) among them—take lighter, more imaginative routes to that pot of gold. (Fiction. 12-15)