Bookends: Nov. 25, 1985

IN HER OWN IMAGE by Anna Murdoch Morrow; 225 pages; $15.95

Cynics will claim that Anna Murdoch's first novel, which bears the dedication "For K.R.M.," was helped into print by the name hiding behind those initials. The fledgling author's husband happens to be Keith Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born press baron whose empire now includes a movie studio and may soon ex tend to a string of independent TV stations in the U.S. But the cynics in this case will be wrong. In Her Own Image would have found a willing publisher if it had been written by someone without an influential spouse to her name. It has most of what blockbusters require these days: sex from the female perspective, an unfulfilled mother and her itchy daughters, and a sympathetic weather system that delivers up heat waves and thunderstorms whenever the plot requires them.

It also has Australia, specifically a vast sheep farm near Canberra owned by Harry and Liz Barton. Liz's mother BB (short for Betty Beauchamp) lives on the place, growing more gaga and malevolent by the day. Worse, Younger Sister Josie arrives from New York City for a Christmas visit, along with her son Alex and her still smoldering passion for Liz's husband. Naturally, family feuds overshadow all those exotic wallabies, kangaroos and kookaburras. But not before Murdoch turns a few deft landscapes and some surprisingly sympathetic portraits of the men trapped in a female fantasy.

SECRETS by Danielle Steel Delacorte; 336 pages; $17.95

In the continuing saga of How the Book World Turns, Danielle Steel is queen of the immaculately coiffed romance. With 19 published novels (more than 55 million copies in print), she knows better than most that the majority of women readers want stories of endless love and eternal youth. Lately a touch of career and financial independence is not out of place. The three soap-opera actresses in Secrets manage to be both busy professionals and powerful love goddesses. The most impressive of the trio converts a homosexual into her lover and father of her child. The plot deals with how these women eventually pair off with three male colleagues. As in the soaps, beauty is not the only thing that is skin deep. Steel and/ or her editors are adept at turning banalities into pleasantries and serious problems like birth defects and murder into inconveniences. The obsession with good looks is total. Scarcely a page goes by without a reminder that the heroes are handsome and the heroines scrumptious. The effect is to raise physical perfection to a spiritual value. In the glitzy world of Secrets, the body is the condominium of the soul.

RICH KIDS by John Sedgwick Morrow; 329 pages; $17.95