Robert Newton Peck has never been more the consummate storyteller than in ["Clunie", a] book about Clunie Finn, a retarded farm girl caught in a web of adolescent cruelty.

Using a breathless present-tense narrative, he puts into play four very different teenagers who want something strangely similar out of the spring season….

Then he lets them loose in a series of alternately gentle and startling chapters, each putting a block on the scale that inevitably tips toward a rainy May afternoon tragedy.

One can occasionally fault the folksy rural dialect, wonder at Clunie's almost-perfect wisdom, and be infuriated with the one-sided treatment of Sally; nonetheless, "Clunie" is a sensitive, compelling story.

But for whom? There's the problem. Mr. Peck makes us care most about outsiders Leo and Clunie. Thus the chapter in which a hot, frustrated Leo is determined to stalk and have the gentle Clunie because "she'd...