[In the following review, Benedict finds the ending of Who Do You Love somewhat unsatisfying but asserts that the novel overall "fulfills its mission."]

The action of Valerie Sayers's new novel, Who Do You Love, takes place during the fateful month of November 1963 in the small South Carolina coastal town of Due East. At the center of the book stands the Rooney family. Catholics living in "a place where the other kids called you mackerel snapper and asked you were the nuns bald under those habits."

That's the way Bill Rooney, the failing pater familias of Who Do You Love, describes his home town, which also is the setting for Sayers's two previous novels, Due East and How I Got Him Back. Bill is a Southerner, raised not far from Due East, who moved to New York City to be a jazz piano player and then returned to his home ground with his young bride.

Dolores Rooney is that bride, 15 years and three children later. A transplanted Yankee, still uncomfortable in the South, she has a penchant for condescending imitations of her Southern acquaintances ("We might could get there in time for the little old sun to set") and for saying things like, "Oh Lord, I guess I've been down South too long. I'm getting so native." It's little wonder that she manages to set on edge the teeth of virtually every Southerner around her.

Bill and Dolores' three children are Andy, Tim and 11-year-old Kate, who is the youngest and a "boiling pot," as her mother describes her. The chief concern of Who Do You Love is Kate's resolute march from innocence into knowledge, and much of the narrative is built around her various misadventures. These are presented in Kate's precocious, sometimes precious vocabulary (she firmly asserts that the Rooneys were "the very last the penultimate family" in Due East to buy a television), which is one of the chief charms of the book.

The primary dramatic episode arises from Kate's failure to distinguish drunken seduction from murder and mayhem. When she trails a threatening local figure known as the Snake Man to his trailer, she believes she's witnessing a kid-naping and killing. Her confusion about what is actually a sexual encounter lasts too long to be entirely credible, but the episode is well-realized:

The Snake Man was kissing the Victim. The Snake Man had paused in front of her hiding place to kiss that poor girl who was so lost in her own terror that she could not support herself to stand up straight. Kate considered showing herself at just that instant: she could climb the bank and cry out like a banshee.

Occasionally, however, Kate's language gets away from Sayers. When Kate can't keep her thoughts from returning to a salacious image, Sayers writes that "the girl in the red nightie's thigh reappeared." When Kate feels tension, we learn that "her lips were streaked with little white surges of panic." Somewhat more diverting is Sayers's fondness for rendering her characters' inarticulate noises. One man says, "Awhhh. Pfff," Bill Rooney utters the classic comic book groan, "Argh," and a kiss is represented as follows: "Chhhhchhhhhchhhhh-smmmooochch." I would love to hear Sayers read that passage aloud.

Another of the book's charms is its ability to move from one character's mind into another's. Kate and Dolores provide the dominant narrative threads, but Bill's point of view occasionally takes over. And each of these characters has a unique voice and vision.

While Kate spends much of her time in jittery contemplation of the mystery of her sexuality, Dolores is convinced that the girl is independently knowledgeable and secure. Kate is ashamed that she doesn't yet own a bra, that she is "the only sixth-grader who would never have a boy come along and thwang! pull the back strap of her Maidenform."

Still, Kate believes that she cannot ask her preoccupied mother about such an intimate subject. Dolores, on the other hand, assumes that her daughter chooses proudly to exhibit her blossoming adulthood "without a brassiere and without apology."

Bill Rooney has his own misconceptions. He imagines that his pregnant wife is a listless romantic, given to daydreams and brief flirtations. In fact, she is a woman of vast, often misdirected passion, who engaged in incest with a cousin as a teenager, who had an affair with a wealthy young neighbor during her first pregnancy and who now feels herself being drawn inexorably into another affair, this time with a visiting reporter from the New York Times.

But if Dolores' yearnings push her into doomed sexual relationships, her conscience, trained by Catholic notions of guilt and mortal sin, pricks her constantly.

The novel's chief plot lines—Dolores' advancing affair, Bill's approaching bankruptcy, Kate's discovery of sex and of her mother's infidelity—are bound together rather loosely. And the book's final episode, in which the Rooney family and all of Due East react to the news that President Kennedy has been assassinated, doesn't really resolve the various storylines.

The Kennedy denouement is telegraphed on the first page, where the month and year are prominently proclaimed; and the sense that the shooting will be pivotal is reinforced by the frequent references the characters make to Kennedy. By the time Kate's teacher says to her class, "I'd like you all to prepare yourselves for an announcement," the reader has been waiting for that particular shoe to drop for some 300 pages. Nor is Kennedy's death presented as the epiphany one might expect; instead it is just another episode in a novel made of episodes.

But despite its shortcomings, Who Do You Love deals fairly and entertainingly with all of its interesting principal players, giving each of them their due time on stage. Determinedly amiable, it is a novel that fulfills its mission.