Books: The Doom of Differences

THE WEATHER OF THE HEART (276 pp.)—Daphne Athas—Appleton-Century ($2.75).

Daphne Athas is young (23), and so is her first novel, an intense story of youthful anguish. Her title is borrowed from Poet Dylan Thomas's line: "A process in the weather of the heart turns damp to dry." It is seldom enough that novelists of any age gauge the process so surely. The Weather of the Heart gives some meaning to that worn publisher's tag, "a new writer of distinction."

The people of the novel are the inhabitants of a Maine coastal village and a...