"She Rises," by Kate Worsley, and More SHE RISES By Kate Worsley Bloomsbury, $26. By Ben Katchor. Pantheon Books. $29.95. In a series of wry graphic narratives on architecture, urban planning and product design, Katchor shows how property influences and reflects cultural values. Above, a panel from "The Office Building Demystified." Through the intertwined stories of her novel's central characters, the young dairymaid Louise and her brother, Luke, Worsley presents a Georgian England that is all squalor and misery. After Luke is conscripted into the British Navy - by means of a whack on the head and shackles - he spends several hellacious months aboard a vessel called the Essex, where he is witness to brutal lashings, horrific injuries and the all-too-familiar gamut of seafaring woes. But Worsley rescues her prose from cliché with well-turned sentences like these: "The clouds shift and stack and move on. The rain comes down and sheets across and drops shimmer in the air like jewels. Louise, meanwhile, is sent to a rough-and-tumble port city to train as a lady's maid to the daughter of a wealthy smuggler. The town stinks of dead fish, urine and the various leavings of very drunken sailors. Worsley is delightfully specific in these descriptions, reminding us often that Louise is shoeless as she walks through the muck. Louise soon falls in love with her languorous and entrancing mistress. The plot whirligigs through the lovers" misfortunes, which, though rousing, tend toward melodrama. A surprise twist is in the offing, and the narrative is forced into somersaults to protect the denouement. Nonetheless, at its heart, Worsley's is a generous novel, concerned with the vulnerability of human life (female life in particular) and the cost of freedom to characters so thoroughly beset by cruelty and limitation. Poor Riddle James Camperdown. It is the summer of 1972 in Wellfleet, Mass., and Jimmy (as Riddle is nicknamed) has witnessed a violent crime on the horse farm next to her family's estate. She chooses, for reasons not entirely clear, to keep silent even when it becomes apparent that what she saw was the murder of a scion of Wellfleet aristocracy. Jimmy is further plagued by circumstances both banal and extraordinary: she is, at 12, in an especially angsty phase of life, her narcissistic parents are at each other's throats like hyenas, and she is temperamentally at odds with her Brahmin community. In addition, she's moody and clumsy and has unruly red hair, for which she is ceaselessly derided by her glamorous mother, Greer. And what a mother! A former film star, Greer is all devastating wit and glacial haughtiness: "She loved the spotlight, reveled in the social power it bequeathed, but her spectacular misanthropy curdled any real delight she might have allowed herself." Riddle's father, "an alpha male with suffragette sympathies," is running for Congress, and Greer resentfully bankrolls his campaign. Kelly's novel is a coming-of-age meets a whodunit - or maybe a whydunit, since the who is evident fairly early. The bright, snappy language generally serves the story well, although it could use more gravity once the Camperdowns, faced with public humiliation and the repercussions of some very dark secrets, begin to fall apart. Narrated by Jimmy as an adult, looking back at that awful summer, the novel is a laugh-out-loud funny page turner. Robert Lee Chatham, the protagonist of Cheng's hypnotic and lyrical debut, is "bad crossed" - that is to say, cursed or bedeviled. The novel opens in 1927, with Robert and his friends playing in the woods under the first rains of the Great Mississippi Flood. A few days later, Robert and his parents are huddled in a rowboat gliding over the drowned world: "Telegraph poles had collapsed together in a nest of crucifixions, their cables willowing into the dark water." These are the Chathams" last days together - the family finds shelter at a refugee camp where Robert's mother goes mad and his father, in desperation, sends him to work as a live-in errand boy at a brothel. When we next encounter him, he is not yet 21 and already worn out by transience, poverty and lovelessness. The novel leaps somewhat erratically among Robert, his equally bad-crossed childhood friends and a pianist-cum-juju man named Eli. Presumably, the characters are connected by whatever curses them, but this overlay of mysticism verges on superfluous; the horror of their lives has less to do with curses than with poverty, race and displacement caused by the flood. When dealing with matters explicitly racial - the lynching of Robert's older brother, for example - the narrative can feel secondhand. Still, Cheng's characters are finely spun, soulful creatures, and his writing is muscular, evocative and haunting: "The moon was a cataract eye. . . . His hummingbird heart smashed itself against his ribs. In passages about the hostile and spooky natural world, or the equally mysterious depths of his characters, Cheng's talent astonishes, and the blues music that so clearly inspired him echoes through the prose. As American frontier tales go, Wascom's debut has a fairly unusual setting: the Mississippi River Valley before its annexation early in the 19th century. The narrator, Angel Woolsack, is the son of an itinerant minister he calls Preacher-father, a man driven by religious zeal into the punishing wilds of Missouri, young Angel in tow. This life of privation ends in the first of the novel's many episodes of gory bloodshed. Within the first hundred pages Angel has become a street preacher with an amoral relationship to God, and a member of a ragtag outfit of thieves. He has fathered a child who dies before birth, buried the child's drowned mother and murdered his own father. Though Wascom's prose is less resonant, he will be compared to Cormac McCarthy - his novel is rife with biblical overtones, laconic psychopaths and violence so frequent and exaggerated it becomes a punch line. Certainly, the book entertains with its energetic language and fast-paced action, and the love story between Angel and his wife is moving in its you-and-me-against-the-world naïveté. Wascom's research is put to good use as the gargantuan forces of history squash Angel and his associates. The territory disputes and political machinations leading to the Louisiana Purchase - in which "trash is set against trash" - figure prominently in Angel's (mis) fortunes, as does the slave trade, which proves a pox on his life. In the end, neither of these considerations, nor Angel's bond with his wife, lends him enough depth to save him from overused motifs about pioneer life, masculinity and violence. Ayana Mathis is the author of a novel, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie."