cover image Miracles

Miracles

Susan Hufford. Dutton Books, $19.95 (276pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24807-1

The lives of two talented women are traced in this spirited novel by a writer of paperback romances. In New York's counterculture of the '60s, Vera, an aspiring photographer, and Annie, a talented painter, become fast friends, despite starkly dissimilar origins--Vera is a Hoosier of Methodist leanings,and Annie, a child of Jewish refugees, familiar with affluence. With marriage and careers, however, they drift apart, finding existences very different from their youthful idealism. In their 40s, both women experience life crises: Annie, who has sublimated her art to bolster the career of her artist-husband, is stricken with cancer; Vera, successful editor of a glossy fashion magazine, is dealing with a troubling marriage and children. Circumstances unite the two on Block Island, where catharsis and a kind of healing occur. Female bonding is the theme, accoutered with fashionable settings, throwaway chic and men both sexually compliant and threatening, in this diverting, not especially original, women's story. (Oct.)