Pretty Girls

Alexandria is from Manhattan, Penelope has lived in Europe all her life, and Caroline hails from Colorado. In this nicely written first novel, their friendship, formed when they were freshmen at the University of North Carolina, is depicted as they start their sophomore year and begin to drift apart. As these young women individually come to terms with personal realities, strengths and weaknesses alike, each achieves a rite of passage. Alex, bulimic and afraid of sex, learns to love and not to purge; Penelope, brittle, snobbish and slightly promiscuous, faces an unexpected pregnancy; Caroline comes to grips with the loss of a lover and a death in her family. Weakened somewhat by pat psychology and a relative lack of drama, Weyr's effort is marked as well by fast-moving dialogue and a tender but unsentimental view of the relationships among these friends as they abandon adolescent fantasies for the pleasures and pains of adulthood. Despite Weyr's own dramatic coming-of-age crisis (she suffered a stroke during her sophomore year at the University of Carolina, and wrote this novel as she recovered), her story is considerably less hard-bitten and more appealing than other recent novels of campus life. (February 4)