"Beginning in fifth grade, Phoebe Fine, the daughter of an oboist in suburban New Jersey, finds that love is a risky game to play. There is Roger Mancuso, who offers Phoebe her first cigarette, her first kiss, and her first experience of loss. There is Spitty Clark, the frat boy and inveterate party animal who's a possible criminal but also somehow a man of honor. Later on, as a young woman living in New York, Phoebe crosses the path of arrogant Pablo Miles (ne Peter Mandelbaum), who licks her hand moments after they meet. And so it goes, as Phoebe struggles to reconcile her conflicting desires for safety and adventure, sympathy and conquest. Lucinda Rosenfeld relates Phoebe's serial, seriocomic encounters with freshness, range, economy, and emotional precision."--BOOK JACKET.