INNOCENCE By Jane Mendelsohn. New York: Riverhead Books. The book sits in my hands. It is the second book the author has written.

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Every word is serious. The declarative sentences pile one on top of another. They carry their solemn freight and pass it on.

The book must be read quickly. It will vanish if you do not read it quickly. Vanish like bats in the inky night.... Sorry, there's just something about Jane Mendelsohn's style that works its way into your system. How you regard this invasion probably depends on how you felt about her last novel, 'I Was Amelia Earhart.' ' For her fans, it was a rhapsodic meditation on the fate of America's most famous aviatrix.

For people like me, it was a quick but suffocating climb into the ether of literary sensibility. In fact, it was nothing but sensibility: a cloud of affect. Fortunately, the mannered, self-dramatizing prose in which Mendelsohn specializes turns out to be appropriate for the mannered, self-dramatizing heroine of her new book, 'Innocence.' ' Beckett Warner is a motherless teenage girl, enrolled in an exclusive private school in Manhattan and reduced to gazing forlornly at the school's beautiful girls, 'mermaids' who lord it over her with hair that 'swung down like rope.' ' She holds little hope of joining them: 'I'm the ugly girl, the smart girl, the boyish girl, the loser. I'm the one who knows too much.'

Rapidshare London Calling Salon. ' Knows too much, indeed. When her father falls under the spell of the school nurse -- a red-haired, green-eyed cupcake named Pamela -- Beckett's the only one who senses something a little peculiar about the woman who will become her new stepmom.

What tips her off? Well, there's the 'placid dead look' that comes into Pamela's eyes at certain moments.