Island

Despite stylistic defects, Schweighardt handles complex emotional issues with some skill in her provocative debut novel about two couples and a crippled adolescent vacationing on an unnamed island as a severe hurricane approaches. College professor Donald Bartlett is a poet who has lost his inspiration and hopes that his young second wife will precipitate the muse's return. The family, including Donald's teenage daughter Meredith, who was born with no feet, is joined by Donald's old friends Roscoe, whose juggling and sword-swallowing routines attract nightly crowds back in Key West, and Belinda, a beautician who works her magic at a nursing home. Everything here is fraught with significance: the storm mirrors the inner turbulence of the players; Meredith's physical imperfections reflect the adults' spiritual deformities; and the setting evokes Prospero and Miranda, as do the characters' concerns with art and artifice. Schweighardt's brief but heavily symbolic work is best read as a modern fable which asks how people variously evade or embrace disaster. (June)