Family bonds, uneasy and eternal

I See You Everywhere
By Julia Glass
Pantheon, 287 pp., $24.95

Who by Fire
By Diana Spechler
Harper Perennnial, 368 pp., paperback, $14.95

The Other Queen
By Philippa Gregory
Touchstone, 448 pp., $25.95

October brings two extraordinarily good novels about the complicated ties of family, and a surprisingly flaccid historical romance about one of history's most fascinating women.

Julia Glass's third novel, "I See You Everywhere," is an unusually rich, complex story about sisters, a relationship that provides a fertile source of material for innumerable fiction writers, who don't always do it justice. These two sisters are, as one of them puts it, "as different as white chocolate and seaweed." The other describes their bond as "a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching."

Louisa is the conventional one. She hopes for marriage and motherhood, pragmatically putting aside her passion for creating pottery for a career as an arts writer and editor. Clement (a.k.a. Clem), four years younger, is daring, reckless, mercurial. Her work as a wildlife biologist takes her to remote places, where she works with endangered animals and jumps restlessly in and out of love affairs.

The sisters take turns narrating their stories, often versions of the same events, in their different voices in alternating episodes that unfold over 25 years, beginning in 1980. Clem, just out of college, has been persuaded by her father to move to Vermont to keep an eye on her 98-year-old aunt Lucy. She finds the elderly woman staving off the specter of death with shopping sprees, and more than willing to spill some long-held family secrets.

In Louisa and Clem, Glass has created two convincing human beings who draw the reader into their lives, through love affairs, marriage, divorce, a near-drowning, a terrible accident, a life-threatening disease. Glass, who won the National Book Award with "Three Junes," has a sharp ear for dialogue and a finely tuned sense of emotional tone. There are some moving passages and some marvelously funny scenes, too.

In Diana Spechler's impressively executed first novel, "Who by Fire," members of a devastated family struggle in different ways to cope with the burden of tragedy. Thirteen years after 6-year-old Alena Kellerman was abducted, her older brother, Ash, who blames himself for her disappearance, drops out of college and moves to Jerusalem to study Orthodox Judaism in a yeshiva. His older sister, Bits, a schoolteacher in Boston, numbs her emotions with drinking and self-destructive sex. Their mother, Ellie, has never stopped looking for Alena. Spechler tells the story from the points of view of the three main characters. Their voices are strong and convincing. Despite some disturbing plot elements, this is not a depressing novel, but a hopeful one. Spechler is a talented writer who transcends melodrama and cliché with striking sensitivity and a delicate touch.

Writers have cast Mary, Queen of Scots as villain, saint, fool, libertine, martyr, manipulator, temptress, and victim, among many things. Philippa Gregory, author of "The Other Boleyn Girl" and a dozen more works of popular historical fiction, weighs in with "The Other Queen," a ponderous romance that's light on action and heavy on exposition. She may be the first novelist to make the controversial queen a bore.

The story is set in the years 1569 to 1572, roughly the first four of the nearly 20 years of the Roman Catholic queen's imprisonment by her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth. Gregory has her three main characters narrate the story: Mary; George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who kept the queen as a privileged prisoner in one of his castles and supposedly fell in love with her; and his strong-willed wife, Bess of Hardwick, a remarkable figure, a clever businesswoman who made her own fortune through five successful marriages. George and Bess were newly married when Elizabeth prevailed on them to keep Mary until she could decide what to do with her. At first the couple thought that sequestering her would advance their standing at court, but it soon became clear that playing host to the demanding queen and her retinue would drain their fortune. George, or Gregory's version of him, at least, was besotted by the young queen: "I can smell the light perfume of her hair under her golden velvet bonnet. For no reason I feel I am growing hot, blushing like a boy." To his wife's dismay, his infatuation placed them in the very dangerous position of being involved, willy-nilly, in Mary's never-ending escape plots and intrigues against Elizabeth.

Reading historical fiction requires suspension of disbelief, perhaps especially when a character is as famous as Mary. The voice Gregory produces for the legendary queen is arrogant and shallow. Bess's voice is the most vivid, a welcome change from George's mooning and the queen's scheming: "There is no peace for a woman who tries to run a proper household with a spendthrift guest and a husband who is a fool."

Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.