Secrets of a Sparrow
Love me. Love my book. Love my poems. Love my look. Puhleeze, Diana, stop in the name of love...and literature. (Villard)

Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend
Another sudsy middle-aged-love story with enough B-movie dialogue to make even Robert Kincaid cringe. (Warner)

The Hope
In this tepid potboiler, set in Israel, characters mingle with famous figures, military men cheat on their wives, and the tiny nation wins every war. So where's the beef? (Little, Brown)

Life's Little Instruction Book, Vol. II
This garden of platitudes is clumsy, dispiriting, humorless and, frankly, not very instructive. (Rutledge Hill)

Feminine Force: Release the Power Within to Create the Life You Deserve
Mosbacher's self-aggrandizing tale of her rise from poverty to riches simply oozes with can-doisms and revisionist feminist psychobabble. (Simon & Schuster)

Free to Love
Never mind the familiarity of a blameless blond Czech émigré being hounded by her tycoon ex-husband and a deceitful press. There's no suspense, no insight into character, no sensory delight: a Trump no-trump. (Pocket)

Lasher
As dull and overdetailed as a history of crabgrass, this novel wastes Rice's evocative prose on another nether-subject: the genealogy of an English family of witches. (Knopf)

The Last Brother
Even the controversy over the author's "re-created" sections of dialogue could not kindle interest in this mean-spirited rehash of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's complex and messy life. (Simon & Schuster)

More Memories
Nashville's Johnny Carson goes to the memoir well once too often in this unrevealing sequel to his 1991 best-seller. (Putnam)

A Place at the Table
This gay conservative resents media coverage of radical gays but fails utterly to explain how change can be won quietly. (Poseidon)

FURTHER FOLLIES

Completed by Marion Mainwaring The Buccaneers (Viking/Penguin)

Notes from the Country Club (Houghton Mifflin)

Honor Among Thieves (HarperCollins)

Cat Physics: A Cartoon Primer (HarperPerennial)

Mitigating Circumstances (Dutton)