THE INCONSTANT SEASON

This is a family album reviewed by Peggy, a child of the thirties who grew up in the war years, with scenes from days at Lake Onaka, in western New York, lingeringly examined and explained. The contrasts between her Dillon and Baldwin grandparents, the close ties between her parents and their relatives, Peggy's own attachment to her older brothers, Ted and Jack, and the younger Andrew, and the complex of associations with school and college friends make up the background for a ""labyrinth of adolescence"" in which Peggy, recalling, remembering, explores the family stories, personalities and attitudes. Her realization has roots in her father's belief that the ""real thing in life....is the family"" and from funerals to reunions, a wedding, a school tragedy, and the many twice-told family stories she makes a composite picture of a heritage and an inheritance. The editor of The Minnesota Review, a writer of short stories and an award winner, the author has created a mood and an atmosphere that follows something of a Franny and pattern and that evokes a sense of people in their time and place, , attentively -- and sensitively reflected.