The War Against Gravity

In her first novel, journalist Rosemary grapples with the subject of environmental terrorism and manages admirably to avoid the pitfall of preachy fiction. Her narrator is a young woman named Carey who uses evocative language and has an amusing wisecracking outlook; on the other hand, she rarely illuminates the events in her chronicle of her discovery that her occasional lover, Dana, a journalist and friend of her family, kills the spokespeople of polluting companies in his spare time. A satisfying conclusion is lacking, because Carey herself does not know everything about what is going on around her--including the activities of the Group, a mysterious gang of people who sabotage equipment that they feel threatens the environment--and because she decides at the close of the novel that fully investigating these events and the suspicious death of a close friend is not worth the trouble. However, descriptive passages about the Northwest, both its human and nonhuman inhabitants and the ways in which they are threatened, are right on the mark. (Feb.)