Best Friends

Reviving Ophelia's success has prompted a stream of retaliatory literature about boys' developmental difficulties — aw, the poor, oppressed widdle fellas — but this pair of psychologists isn't yet finished with the girls. Theirs is a simpatico if slightly casual study of how the often horrid rituals of young female friendship (grooming one another like chimps, cutting someone from the pack for not shaving her legs, handing out secrets as casually as party favors) subtly persist throughout adulthood. Best Friends' major flaw is that writing team Terri Apter and Ruthellen Josselson chose to conflate their voice into one ''I,'' eliminating what would have been a precise, if clunky ''She said, she said,'' and replacing it with a nagging ''Sez who?'' B+