Three Little Maids From School : PRETTY GIRLS<i> by Garret Weyr (Crown Publishers: $15.95; 192 pp.)</i>

Twenty-three-year-old Garret Weyr’s first novel opens with a lively, staccato prose that reflects the excitement of reunion. Alex, Penelope, and Caroline--charter members of “the Amazon Club”--are en route to college, and one another, after a summer vacation apart. Though what happens to each girl over the course of a single semester is eventful, this book is about their friendship, and about becoming young women together.

One of the strengths of this novel is how well it captures the relentlessness of change in the lives of 20-year-olds. Not only do a series of events from without throw these young characters into turmoil, but their own desires and receptivities are in such flux that they’re doubly overwhelmed. The news from the front is never good, and Weyr’s characters alternate between a depression that seems inevitable and a wonderful, sardonic humor that Oscar Wilde would have appreciated.

This novel charts a journey from innocence to experience, that is convincing, and not just for these three college students. If rape, bulimia, homosexuality and teen-age pregnancy read like topics for “The Donohue Show,” they are not out-of-the-ordinary in the lives of young women today. What differentiates the Amazon Club from some of their contemporaries, however, is that they chart their separate courses with self-respect. A self-respect that comes from seeing their strengths--intelligence, forcefulness, independence--mirrored in one another.

Weyr’s descriptions of people’s bodies, and their relationships to their own physicality, are full of nuance and acutely felt. Similarly, her handling of action and exterior event are strongly in the service of the novel’s ideas. It is her characters’ interior lives that feel less fully imagined, however, and this reviewer looks forward to a more intimate internal landscape in future work.