STONES FROM THE RIVER

Touchstone, 1997. Very Good. Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 1997: Ursula Hegi's Stones from the Ri ver clamors for comparisons to Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum; her protagonist Trudi Montag--like the unforgettable Oskar Mazerath--is a dwarf living in Germany during the two World Wars. To its credit, Stones does not wilt from the comparison. Hegi's book has a distinctive, appealing flavor of its own . Stone's characters are off-center enough to hold your attention despite t he inevitable dominance of the setting: There's Trudi's mother, who slowly goes insane living in an "earth nest" beneath the family house; Trudi's bes t friend Georg, whose parents dress him as the girl they always wanted; and , of course, Trudi herself, whose condition dooms her to long for an imposs ible normalcy. Futhermore, the reader's inevitable sympathy for Trudi, the dwarf, heightens the true grotesqueness of Nazi Germany. Stones from the Ri ver is a nightmare journey with an unforgettable guide.