TITLE: BEFORE AND AFTER
AUTHOR: ROSELLEN BROWN
PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 354 PAGES; $21
THE BOTTOM LINE: Yes, you do know where your son is: jail.
Until children can be flash-frozen at 12 and thawed out as college juniors, a technological advance that surely will start a new service industry, Rosellen Brown's plot can be counted on to grab a mother or father by the ventricles. Lying awake in sweaty sheets at 3 a.m., any parent of any teenager ! sees an immediate future more or less like Brown's melodrama: a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy named Jacob, no sulkier or...
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