THINGS WON'T BE THE SAME

Ten-year-old Marcy's divorced mother is remarrying: that's why ""things won't be the same."" And sometimes the book tackles this common problem with a like directness--even to the point of overcoming the stagy contrast between Marcy's conventional, orderly suburban-Pennsylvania mother and her father's second wife, a guitar-playing, natural-foods-minded San Francisco weaver. . . whom Marcy gets to know when she spends the four weeks of her mother's honeymoon with the pair in S.F. Ginny's ways have advantages and disadvantages, Marcy reasonably decides; and she's altogether taken with her father's stamp-and-coin-dealing business. It was his father's business, she discovers, and one that she might want to enter in turn. (Her introduction to stamp-collecting is far and away the most engrossing, least blatantly setup episode in the book.) So she's reluctant to go home; and, once home, upset by what she construes as the newlyweds' neglect--especially by comparison to their attentiveness to stepfather Bill's visiting daughter, cutesy pre-teen Carole Anne. But she's no sooner conveyed her feelings to her father than she repents: how can she get along without her mother? hadn't she noticed how nice they all are? And, believe it or not, a bikini--like Carole Anne's (and friend Wendy's)--plus a new name (paralleling Carole Anne's ""C.A."" and Wendy's ""Gwen""), clinches her reconciliation. A pat, trivializing conclusion, then; and like A Private Matter (1976), erratic--but readable--throughout.