* Fiction. By Anne River Siddons. Grand Central, $24.99. Grade: B-

Plot in a nutshell: In Off Season, the prolific Siddons returns to her theme of women finding themselves amid the cocooning embrace of the sea (Outer Banks, Low Country, Up Island).

In this story, middle-aged and newly widowed Lily Constable returns to her family's seaside cottage in Edgewater, Maine, where she spent her childhood and where her husband Cam died.

Alone in the cottage with Cam's ashes and his ill-tempered cat Silas, Lily reminisces about the pivotal summer of 1962 when she was 11 and roamed wildly and freely through the area with others of her age. The summer's glory intensifies when Lily meets Jon, a newcomer just slightly older, who shares her interest in the natural world and who awakens the first savage stirrings of young love.

Unfortunately, the halcyon days are shattered when a jealous visiting neighbor child spitefully reveals that Jon is Jewish and would be banned from local clubs. Jon, already carrying guilt from other family burdens, is so shocked by the revelation that he sails into the fog with Lily's father's sailboat and drowns.

Lily escapes her grief by isolating herself within an imaginary wet suit and becoming a skilled underwater swimmer. This escape mechanism intensifies when her mother dies prematurely of breast cancer, and Lily and her father cloister themselves away from world events of the 1960s.

She is dramatically rescued from this isolation by Cam, who wins her heart but who encloses her as surely as the imaginary wet suit did years earlier.

Sample of prose: "(I was) sitting down and leaning back against a smooth-worn boulder left there more than ten million years before. It had a slight concavity that fit my back and head nearly perfectly. I sat back in the flood of the moon and looked at Jon who sat beside me. The last glacier had left him a seat too. At that moment we reigned over heaven and earth."

Pros: Siddons readily captures the magic of the remote natural area of Maine and the exuberance of pre-adolescence.

Cons: With a passive central character and little real joy for reader relief, the book is emotionally draining.

Final word: Fans will be disappointed with the melodramatic final two chapters and epilogue, which are clumsy and contrived, spoiling the overall effect.