Sixteen-year-old Billie James, heroine of Sandra Scoppettone's Long Time Between Kisses … has grown up in SoHo and Greenwich Village, and she dodges drug dealers and street crazies with aplomb. Harder to take lightly are her divorced parents: her mother, a failed artist turned carpenter …, and her father, a failed musician who freaks out on angel dust and has to be dragged away in a straitjacket. What can Billie do under the circumstances but cut her hair very short and dye it purple? This precipitates a breakup with her boyfriend, and soon Billie believes she's in love with a mysterious "older man" of 21 about to be confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis.

Weird, huh? Yet this relentlessly up-to-date scenario camouflages a conventional Y.A. plot: basically good kid learns basic moral lessons—like doing the right thing hurts but it's better than selfish fantasy, and you don't have...