Body Sharers

Fourteen-year-old Cam's discovery of her mother's dead body launches a dark and powerful, if at times unsubtle first novel. Cam's absentee father sends her to live with a distant step-cousin, Scofield, and his wife Marge. A complex interplay of points of view--Cam's first-person reminiscences and the third-person narratives of Scofield, Marge, and others--chronicles her childhood, beset by tragedy and abuse. Repeatedly raped at age four by Scofield himself, Cam was initiated into ``body sharing'' as the nine-year-old victim of a coterie of her teachers; at thirteen she had an abortion. Now, while Cam seeks solace in sex with an older girl named Dana, Scofield again forces her into a physical relationship that finally drives her to the end of her tolerance and to despair. The author explores Cam's intense, precocious sexuality with a fearless honesty that gives her character a disturbing vividness. Yet the fiercely sensual imagery sometimes comes across as ponderous overwriting or awkward abstraction, as when she describes a woman's eyeshadow as ``a jar on a pasture hill, a curtain sewn across a valley.'' In addition, the intrusion of an absurdly gothic element--Scofield is plagued by a phantom dog--mars the admirable verisimilitude achieved in Cam's personality. For the most part, though, Rose's ambitious foray into difficult territory makes for a highly affecting debut. (June)