Angels Flying Slowly

For much of its length, this first-person account of an adolescent girl's coming of age in post-WWII England seems to be a YA novel somewhat out of its genre. In the last few chapters, however, the story abruptly turns into an adult tale of deception and death. Narrator Isobel, who is 12 when the book opens in 1947, relates how she and her younger sister, Caro, are shunted off to a convent boarding school so their indifferent mother can ``enjoy herself'' with husband-to-be Frank. Frank's gorgeous and manipulative niece, Ursula, moves in with the girls both at home and at school, always currying favor with the adults and telling lies that get Isobel and others in trouble. There are occasional portentous foreshadowings of the doom that will befall Ursula, who is having an affair not only with the school's father confessor but with one of the nuns as well. First-novelist Roe paints with a broad brush devoid of nuance: the girls' mother is stereotypically cold; their stepfather predictably loutish; some of the nuns malevolently nasty; and Ursula quintessentially beautiful and wicked. Her evocations of the oppressions of convent life and the scenery of her native Cornwall are sometimes effective, but she is weak at plotting, and thus the denouement lacks punch, coming off as ludicrous rather than ironic. (Nov)