THE TRACKS OF ANGELS

The heroine of this debut novel is a young refugee to the East Coast from Redondo Beach, California—a woman whose courageous efforts to reclaim her happy childhood invade the reader's imagination and don't let go. Laura Neuman has had a remarkably unlucky adolescence. Her brainy mother, who planned back in the Sixties to attend medical school after her daughter reached school age, is instead struck down by cancer and dies when Laura is 12. Laura's father, a well- meaning but hopelessly imperceptive advertising executive, soon marries the woman with whom he had long been carrying on an affair. Feeling abandoned by her father and unbearably guilty over her mother's death, the once-dutiful Laura becomes an ``underachiever,'' eventually dropping out of high school to work at a roller-skate concession on the beach. By the time her father is hit by a semi and left almost completely paralyzed, Laura has become so zombie-like that he's able to persuade her to help him kill himself. The funeral snaps her out of her funk; the 18-year- old flees the reception via Greyhound for Boston for no better reason than that it's as far away as she can get. After renting a tiny, bare apartment in Brookline, she begins to try to build a new life: working as a waitress in an Italian restaurant, embarking on a self-education program guided by the entries in a used encyclopedia (``Aristotle''; ``Abell, Kjeld, Danish playwright''), sleeping with an untrustworthy man who claims he was similarly traumatized, and fighting off bouts of fear and confusion through invigorating conversations with a very harried imaginary angel. Despite occasional episodes of emotional ingenuousness: a radiant, seductive coming-of-age story that captures all the wonder and high anxiety of young adulthood.