HANNAH AND THE BEST FATHER ON ROUTE 9W

Further mishaps and consolations at The Grand View Restaurant on the west bank of the Hudson in the 1930s--which Hannah's unquenchable father bas painted a blue-and-yellow checkerboard in hopes of winning the annual certificate for Most Attractive Place on Route 9. (Last year it was judged Cleanest Place--but ""too plain"" to be Most Attractive.) Hannah meanwhile bas hopes that her friendly but unruly mutt Skipper will settle clown sufficiently to win the movie-house dog show. And Aunt Becky is visiting from Brooklyn--with her matzo-ball soup (a happy surprise, this time, to Hannah), her knitted ""guess whats"" (a burden to ail), and her chatter about her irreproachable poodle, ""Poopala-darling."" The contretemps, as well as the Aunty Becky bits, are more routinely comic than usual: Skipper, for instance, runs away from a bath trailing suds, and tons amok in the movie house. And the parallel between a snooty little girls' disparaging remarks about Skipper and the snooty jury's jibes at the checkerboard paint-job is a little too neat. But the book ends with the kind of bracing, low-key comeback that's been characteristic of the series: Hannah and her father, both ""losers,"" have banana splits and make fresh plans. (One of his, engagingly, is to paint the alternate blue shingles yellow.) Series-fanciers may feel slightly disappointed, then, but not betrayed.