New York. 1992. June 1992. Turtle Bay Books. 1st American Edition. Very Good

New York. 1992. June 1992. Turtle Bay Books. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0679413006. 239 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo by Arthur Tress. Jacket design by /Susan Mitchell. keywords: American Literature Women. DESCRIPTION-The two novellas in this eighth book from Ingalls ( Mrs. Caliban, The Pearlkillers ) per usual style? depend less on outright fantasy than her previous works do, though her maverick imagination has supplied an intriguing premise for each of them. Be My Guest seems odd to call it title story when there are only two stories in book concerns a rather bland young woman, Sandra, who impulsively decides to marry a man with a spooky, eccentric son. Though Ingalls establishes Sandra as a closet romantic who is waiting for life to fulfill her dreams, she does not convince the reader that Sandra would let herself be swept precipitously into marriage even after discovering that her fiance was accused of killing his first wife. Sis and Bud chronicles the sibling protagonists' emotional trauma when they learn they were adopted. Alma and Bruce eventually seek out or ‘seek out' their natural parents, but Bud's obsession with exacting revenge on the mother who abandoned him leads to an unconvincingly melodramatic denouement. Though carefully contructed and well thought-out, the stories are essentially inert. The characters' aberrant behavior is suitably explained, but not conveyed with the rising tension that Joyce Carol Oates, for example, brings to her works of psychological suspense. And the ambiguous endings of both tales are less provocatively teasing than frustrating. -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. inventory #16589.

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