What do actors do to survive between plays? Not as in how do they pay their rent, but in where do they live out their dramas? With and for whom can they perform? What do they do to avoid the dreaded "ordinariness"? For 40-year-old Justin Stokes, with successful New York plays to her credit, she becomes obsessed with a desire she had during the summer that she turned 14.

An appealing subject, since we all probably have had a summer that became the summer; one special section of intense joy and pain that remains forever roped off in enchantment from the rest of our lives. It may have involved a first job, a memorable trip, a change in family circumstances, but, inevitably, if there was real magic, it involved a person. For young Justin, it was Ursula De Vane, a dynamic, unconventional 44-year-old woman with "a flair for improvisations," and actress manque with her own need for an audience. That need is at least one explanation for the sophisticated Ursula to encourage so young a girl into such an intense friendship. There is no wonder at all for the girl's infatuation with her.

Justin is a stranger in a strange land, having recently been uprooted from her Virginia home where, within a year, her father and the grandparents who raised her all died. Against Justin's protests and pleadings, her mother moves their remaining family north to the rural township of Clove, in Upstate New York. Here, Justin, her displaced mother and 6-year-old brother come to live in a characterless house with their bourgeois Aunt Mona and her surly, spoiled daughter.

Then one day, Aunt Mona's deadly plastic runners over her sea-foam green carpets and Clove's look-alike houses with no history and school bus rides of harsh Yankee accents are no longer the sole borders of Justin's life. For Justin has happened upon an old stone hut in a pine forest, and in it, a woman who makes the sun come out. The stone hut stands on what is left of the once vast De Vane property. It is Ursula's retreat; the place where Ursula comes to be "rereading Proust" until her brother Julian's robotish piano students finish their lessons up in the big main house. The stone hut, nicknamed "The Finishing School," is a key spot for Ursula, who once taught at a real finishing school, to expound her theories on life and art to Justin. It is also the site of pain and betrayals that are hinted at all through the book.

Gail Godwin gives us the adult Justin as narrator—opening the novel after Justin has had an exceptionally vivid dream about Ursula, and "when Ursula appears in a dream, it is usually to stir things up." So Justin stokes her memories, and, in reviewing the old situation, brings her 14-year-old self to us in flashback.

The time we spend with this sharp, sensitive adolescent girl is delightful. Every emotion rings true: her self-consciousness over being so mesmerized by a woman; her conflicts of loyalties between her mother—now a disappointment—and her dazzling new mentor/friend. We can ache for this Justin so chagrined over her dependence on Ursula's approval, meticulously pacing her visits to the De Vane house, lest a teen-ager wear out her welcome. We can relish this girl with a need for magic, who goes off to "meditate" or "become" Ursula when she is alone; this wise person in that funny country between child and woman, sitting there trying to sort out feelings that cannot be labeled and may never really be fully understood.

Unfortunately, the time we spend in her engaging company is interrupted again and again by the adult Justin's digressions of hindsight and omniscient teases of what is to come—which is all the more an awkward device when narrator apologizes to reader for having digressed, then continues to do so.

I certainly quarrel with Godwin allowing constant hints of the "betrayals" and "tragedy" that lie ahead. If they're meant as appetite whetters, more's the letdown when the outcome finally arrives. There's also a maddening repetition of scenes and dialogue as Justin first tells us about something Ursula said and did, then, chapters later, plays the actual scene—word for word—so you keep shuffling pages back and forth, thinking scene transpositions from earlier drafts somehow weren't ironed out in the published edition. There are other narrative repetitions (and must we be told how Aunt Mona's "feathercut quivers" every time she appears?). There are heavy-handed expositions, collaring us to make sure we get something that was quite clear in the first place. This is all the more dumbfounding among so many lovely, subtle thoughts, clever ironies and well-crafted passages; all the more bizarre in a novel by a talented and critically acclaimed writer as Gail Godwin surely is.

But I loved the basic subject so much, I wanted to look away from the technical flaws the way you do when you discover that your new Big Crush has dandruff. The point is, I had a good time, anyway. I loved dramatic, eccentric Ursula and her fierce twin beliefs of avoiding ordinariness and staving off "jellification," i.e., the dangerous state of not changing. And I loved the adult Justin's need to stir up drama, to connect 26 years ago with today. "For what it's worth," she says to the Ursula in her head, "I have absorbed you. As long as I live, you live in me." For what it's worth, The Finishing School says full speed ahead to honoring our old obsessions—and that's worth a lot.