By LESLIE PARSONS

It saddens me, maybe more than it should, that my inaugural post on the book blog be such a lukewarm review, especially consider that the book in question was written by one of my favorite authors.

Joyce Carol Oates - a woman who has appeared on my "Top 5 Public Figures I'd Have to a Dinner Party" list and countless other celebrity worship lists I've constructed in times of no better occupation - has failed to inspire me as she usually does.

In her latest work - at least I believe it to be her latest work, it is very possible in the few days it took me to read this book that she has published again - she tells the story of a 15-year-old nanny, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks summer transplant in an affluent harbor town, who becomes the object of affection, attention, and art for a 68-year-old man of note in the town whom she fears? loves? hates? admires? envies? understands? Katya struggles to process her hardly post-pubescent feelings for Mr. Kidder as the darkness of his desires become clear.

For me, the story fails in its telling - which is unfortunate considering that the tale itself is poignant, mysterious, and captivating. In what seems an effort to develop an underlying theme of the perversion of fairy tale, the author uses base, repetitive prose, forced allegory and trite language delivered from her characters to evoke the Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties of our past, but some ideas are just better on paper.

But we trudge through the narrative, driven by the plot and our desire to know what will become of Katya when public encounters with Mr. Kidder turn to private, late-night rendezvous in his art studio in progressing stages of undress. And as the tale of an attractive, trim, blond girl from a notorious family - an alcoholic mother, an absent father, and a recently un-jailed kissing cousin - is juxtaposed against the wealth and privilege of the affluent Bayhead Harbor, striking moments develop that, quite honestly took this humble reader's breath away.

But you wait. You wait for those moments, flipping through pages of the stale development of the leading characters' interactions.

I found myself wishing against the safety of young Katya simply so that something would happen during the slow escalation of their relationship. It wasn't deliciously slow, as some moments spent waiting for the rise of action in a novel can be. I didn't find myself savoring the early progress of their encounters. It was just slow.

I should admit, though, that I'm spoiled by Oates' short fiction. I was first introduced to the author when one of her short stories came across my Little Tykes desk many years ago. OK, maybe it wasn't that long ago, but I have been with her for a long time. Her short stories are like Lindor truffles - small, perfectly wrapped, easily savored, complex, just this side of overwhelming, and available at any Barnes and Noble. I would have preferred this 165-page novel as a short story, I imagine.

But this leaves unanswered, due in no small part to the amblings of my own prose, the question that any book review seeks to address. Do you read this book? To which I say, yes, of course, because the worst of Joyce Carol Oates is better than the best of most authors, and I wouldn't even consider this the worst.

I look forward to reading "Dear Husband," a collection featuring the latest of Oates' short fiction, where I can once again return to one of my favorite authors in one of my favorite forms.