"MONSOON MADNESS" by Gae Rusk; Granville Island Publishing, paper, $14.95

Cecily Havenshack, the lead character in Kauaian Gae Rusk's premiere novel, is pretty and smart. She lives in a palace in an exotic locale with her diplomat husband and two closets' worth of made-to-order clothes.

And she is a mess. Clumsy both in the klutzy sense and in relationships. She is abandoned by her husband for reasons that are unclear to her, burned out on her teaching job, plagued by servant problems, lonely, half in love with a friend of her husband's, isolated and all but friendless.

Then she encounters the wrong — the very, very wrong — man, and her life really goes into a tailspin.

Rusk handles suspense and foreshadowing well. Her writing hums along with nothing clunky to get in the reader's way. And she skillfully evokes the sensually rich setting — monsoon season in Katmandu, where she once lived.

The problem for the reader is the same one experienced by Cecily herself: Men view her as a cute ditz and women find her cold or just boring — and both have good reason. Writing primarily in Cecily's point of view, Rusk tries to convince us that the character has more depth than is apparent on the surface. But I still hadn't engaged with Cecily even as she was packing her bags, readying to leave town as monsoon season ends.

The book is set in the '70s, and perhaps my problem is that it's hard to remember how naive women could be at that time, given society's treatment of them, and how insular the consular /colonial world was.

Instead of feeling sympathy for Cecily, I found her annoyingly clueless and inexplicably helpless. Having swallowed this short novel at a gulp, as several friends had done before me, I ended up unsatisfied, and feeling clueless myself.