A Londoner of Scotch-Irish background, Lynne Reid Banks shares a lot of the virtues of her British contemporaries, such younger women novelists as Margaret Drabble and Maureen Duffy. Like theirs, her work concerns the lives of young, middle-class British women who, though rather surprisingly apolitical to American eyes, are searching for new life styles that will free them from the joyless patterns of current bourgeois family life. There is a solid, open toughness about their styles, and an unsparing, almost relentless effort at self-examination characterizes their heroines.

If they share a common flaw, it is that their protagonists' collective drive toward knowing themselves gets too predictably bogged down in a kind of self-absorption that blinds them to their "real" lives. As they struggle to free themselves from the very real oppressions of a society that demands everything and delivers emptiness and alienation, they become rather maddeningly willing victims...