Books: Not So Innocent

MEG (242 pp.)—Theodora Keogh—Creative Age ($2.75).

Meg is the story of a little girl, but it is not for little girls. Nor is it for grownups whose memories of childhood have been identified with their memories of Little Men and Little Women.

Meg at twelve is a puzzle to her schoolmates, a trial to her teachers, a constant irritant who sends her unsympathetic father's blood pressure zooming. She lives on Manhattan's fashionable Beekman Place, but she runs wild with a gang of dead-end kids on the banks of the East River. The other children at Miss Drew's School for Girls are delivered...