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Margaria FichtnerGrowing up too quickly in small-town Florida
Growing up too quickly in small-town Florida

Glory Marie is the saddest and most scary female character to inhabit Fowler's fiction. Entrapped by alcoholism and a violent past, she loves her daughters with a terrible fierceness. Before Women Had Wings. Connie May Fowler. Putnam. 272 pages. $22.95.

COMMENT
Did publisher do the right thing in turning down Goebbels book?

FRANCIS LOEWENHEIM Should a major U.S. publisher cancel publication of a biography of Joseph Goebbels, the top Nazi propagandist and virulent anti-Semite, because the book has been described by some advance reviewers as ``repellent'' and ``scurriously misleading,'' and because word of its forthcoming appearance aroused considerable political opposition?

An on-the-skids adventurer among the mines and Rose beds

Rose. Martin Cruz Smith. Doubleday. 368 pages. $25.95. By LES STANDIFORD ``The most beautiful women in the world were African,'' begins Martin Cruz Smith's new novel, Rose; it is the opening to a passage that illuminates the passions of Jonathan Blair, gold mining engineer, African explorer, iconoclast, soon-to-be amateur detective and the protagonist of this literate and engaging historical mystery set, not in Africa, as it turns out, but in the British coal fields of the 1870s.

Preppie roomies and how they grew

The Last of the Savages. Jay McInerney. Knopf. 320 pages. $24. By BETSY WILLEFORD Outside the world of TV sitcoms, it would be hard to imagine two more unlikely prep-school roommates than Patrick Kearne and Will Savage, one a working-class student from a nearby New England mill town, the other a Memphis renegade with patricide in his DNA. They meet in 1967, at the beginning of ``that psychedelic decade,'' and remain close while Patrick goes on to become a corporate lawyer and Will a kingmaker in the music business with an ego the size of a military transport and a body overripe as the mature Marlon Brando's.

Balancing two lives in quest of a dream

América's Dream. Esmeralda Santiago. HarperCollins. 325 pages. $23. By KATHLEEN KROG América Gonzalez, the heroine of Esmeralda Santiago's first novel, works as a maid in a small resort on a Puerto Rico out island. When the story begins, América hasn't yet articulated a dream to motivate her beyond her confined world.

PAPERBACKS
News to use, Florence and lovers' tales

By CHARLES SOLOMON Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News and Why: The 1996 Project Censored Yearbook. Edited by Carl Jensen & Project. Seven Stories. 352 pages. $14.95.

MOTHER, MAY I?

Would your mom permit you to hang her from the ceiling and dress her like an angel? Would she drag a large wooden cross down a supermarket aisle? Would she pose in a geisha girl's kimono? A treadbare fur coat? Prison stripes? Probably not. So, lucky Judy Olausen. The photographer's 74-year-old mother, Vivian, will do anything for a wacky picture, such as Mother as Enabler, above. Vivian explores parenthood's wild side in Mother (Penguin Studio, $24.95). We love the wooden clothespins, the poker chips and the I Like Ike button.