Spunky heroines: I've lived my life since girlhood wanting to be one and to this day they remain my preferred characters in fiction. But, in reading these two new novels, Them That Glitter and Them That Don't [by Bette Greene] and The Callender Papers [by Cynthia Voigt], I missed that familiar frisson of identification with the protagonists of either book. This isn't, I hasten to add, simply because I'm from the wrong age-group, or I don't think it is; certainly, I continue to become Alice or Dorothy over and over again, when I reread their adventures….

This magical process of "identification" can't be achieved by formula; rather, it's like what they say about love: it's chemical…. [There] wasn't a single moment in either book that I had that connection with, and I want to explain why.

Both Bette Greene and Cynthia Voigt have chosen to write about worlds...