THE CHEERLEADER

At first this seems as straight as a bobby pin and pastel-clean as a Necco wafer (there are all kinds of nostalgic foodstuffs here -- marshmallow fluff and a Pyrrhic gastric victory -- three Awful-Awfuls or frappes in one sitting). The tone too seems younger (our girl Henrietta is fifteen and her Sweet Sixteen occasion takes place here) and chronologically earlier (the Eisenhower years) for this growing-up in New Hampshire told in a chirpy fashion except when ""Ughy pew"" indicates the opposite. But it's hard not to like Snowy and her best friends Bev and Puddles and not to sympathize with Snowy's increasingly intense first love affair in which the sex veers from adolescent Getting Fresh to adult, in a hurry. This of course makes it more of a woman's book than a girl's book but it's really only Fair-Fair.