Caitlin, on the other hand, lives part of the year with her wealthy mother Phoebe, who’s just moved to Albuquerque, and summers with her father Lamb, equally affluent, on the Vineyard. Victoria, or more commonly Vix, lives in a small house her brother has muscular dystrophy her mother is unhappy, and money is scarce. In sixth grade, when Victoria Weaver is asked by new girl Caitlin Somers to spend the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard, her life changes forever. The years pass by at a fast and steamy clip in Blume’s latest adult novel (Wifey, not reviewed Smart Women, 1984) as two friends find loyalties and affections tested as they grow into young women. It's filled with quaint and curious lore, steam-powered conveyances, and state-of-the-art engines of destruction, but it smells of the lamp. An exhilarating, frustrating mixture of originality and regurgitated arcana. Nonetheless, the novel teems with witty conversation and vigorous incident and is further buoyed by such pleasures as Rebolledo's ingenious characterization of Voltaire as a mysterious hybrid compounded of paranoia, moral courage, hypochondria, and indomitable vitality.

They are unfortunately many: a plethora of just barely dramatized theoretical chemistry and Newtonian physics, for example, and a gratingly redundant succession of sex scenes all but indistinguishable one from the other. We can do anything we want to.'' That seems to be the aesthetic that powers Rasero, an imposing omnium-gatherum that vibrates with energy and purpose despite its longueurs. Other climaxes occur during Fausto's lovemaking, in whichin an amusing lift from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbowhis orgasms (with Madame de Pompadour, among many, many others) trigger visions of violence and carnage that we recognize as genocidal refinements achieved by modern warfarers, and from which Fausto concludes: ``Human inventiveness is inexhaustible. A climax of sorts is reached when Fausto debates political theory with Robespierre, Rousseau, and Danton, among others, just before the Revolution drives him out of Paris.

Fausto is befriended by Diderot but modestly declines to write an introduction for the EncyclopÇdie. It's the story, set in 18th-century Europe (mainly Paris) and Mexicoand, in part, in the futureof the varied education enjoyed and suffered by Fausto Rasero, an intellectually curious young Spaniard, mysteriously bald since birth, whose innate sophistication and unconventional magnetism bring him into intriguingly close contact with many of the great figures of the Enlightenment. An astonishingly ambitious first novel from Mexican writer and former scientist Rebolledo, winner of the Mobil Corporation's 15th annual Pegasus Prize for Literature.

Rasero by Francisco Rebolledo