FOURTEEN

Some funny, savvy stuff—especially about being the offspring/model of a children's book writer—hung on a forced, crypto-mystery plot. "The girls in your stories are always me or the exact opposite of me or twice as much as me," Rebecca taxes her mother, "but they all have such interesting things happen to them." No more, her mother promises; and while she writes a formula teenage romance, First Love (with a virginal heroine, because "That's the new look in teenage books"), Rebecca has her own, outlandish first—romance—with short, weepy, plant-loving, rabbit-hating, non-biking (-running, -swimming) Jason Furst, who moves into the apartment next door with his near-hysterical, very unfriendly mother. . . who, says Jason, got that way after his father went off to Europe "on business" and they had to move to San Francisco. The question, then, is what really happened to Jason's father; and the answer, which Rebecca forces out, shouldn't happen—he's in prison. The romantic attraction, though, is handled with tongue-in-cheek finesse. Rebecca's writer-mother fell in love with her pharmacist/poet father because of a poem about her runny: nose. Rebecca herself fails in love with botanist-to-be Jason because he compares her face, with its freckles, to the inside of a favorite flower. (Plus, Rebecca wants to take over her grandfather's pharmacy, bane of her father's existence.) Bubbly and offbeat and, yes, more interesting than the likes of First Love.