THE SERPENTINE CAVE

THE SERPENTINE CAVE Jill Paton Walsh (St. Martin's, $20.95) ''What was hard to see was the shape of another person, uncovered whole,'' muses Marian, the searching heroine of this novel about, well, exactly that: the difficulty of seeing other people in their entirety, not just physically, but psychologically and emotionally. Marian is visiting the English fishing village where she was born to try to find out more about her mother, Stella, and her father, whose name she never knew. As she burrows deeper and deeper into the community and its memories, the outlines of her parents gradually emerge; understanding their story, the truth of her own becomes clear. It is not always a subtle psychological study, but it is affectingly done. B+