Charmed Circle

The author of Loveday offers few surprises and fewer appealing characters in her tale of an English schoolgirl's neurotic friendship with selfish neighbors. Rachel Bond is packed off to boarding school as Britain slides toward WW II. While spending holidays with her doughty grandparents in a small town in the countryside, she falls in with the Rossiters, a privileged family who lead a noisy, colorful life next door. Lofty Diana snubs the newcomer, and her sister Alannah is a whiner, but Barney is solid and likable, while the vague charm of eldest son Gavin makes Rachel swoon. Over the years, everything the tight-knit clan does reinforces Rachel's sense of inferiority. The author semaphores so wildly that all is not right with this pack of narcissists that the sordid secrets she finally reveals fall flat, and she never satisfactorily answers the question of why Rachel would suffer for so long in the awful Rossiters' shadow. Readers who revel in stiff upper lips and romantic endings after much tribulation may enjoy this portrait of a very British circle, bounded though it is by cliches and stilted dialogue. (Jan.)