Books: Question Marks

YOURS, AND MINE by JUDITH RASCOE 204 pages. Atlantic—Little, Brown.$6.95.

There are funny, sad girls who look at you with lopsided little smiles and say "Oh, well," making it sound like an amen to doomsday. Even their answers end with question marks. They move around a lot—New York to California, job to job, man to man. But wherever they are, they seem to perch on an invisible staircase, spying upon the grownups' party below.

Somewhere in their past a normal expectation failed, a reasonable trust in life was lost. Other people live. The sad girls merely survive—spiritually older than their grandmothers,...