THE SEASON HAS BROUGHT with it a huge pile of books with which I've built a tower in the comer of my study.

First of all, there's Sheila Dalton's Tales of the Ex Fire-Eater, (Aurora, 150 pages, $13.95 paper) in which 14 year-old Antoinette (a.k.a. Fido) runs away from her "admittedly cock-eyed past" as a circus fire-eater. She and her bisexual boyfriend, Lawrence, take up residence in downtown Toronto, but eventually, when Lawrence takes a boyfriend of his own, Antoinette ends up rooming -- platonically -- with Lawrence's friend Tim, a talented potter. The novel has a wealth of colourful secondary characters -- Mr. Salto, the fearsome circus master; Sun Yet Sing, a purveyor of fine Zen philosophy; Joey, the downtrodden clown, to name but a few -- but it is the remarkable consciousness of Antoinette herself that is the book's most interesting aspect.

Antoinette's relationship with her mother, who specializes in disappearing (literally), forces Antoinette to confront issues of fight and wrong, the nature of morality in general, and her own place in what she considers a complex, confusing world. The story has an element of parable. At times it tests the limits of what we like to think of as reality, yet it rings psychologically true.

Another young girl with guts and fortitude is the central character in Luanne Armstrong's Annie (Polestar, 336 pages, $16.95 paper). Annie's very existence shakes up the Old Wild west stereotypes of what men and women ought to be. When Annie and her two brothers are orphaned, she does not get married to the first guy who asks her and live unhappily ever after. This cowgirl saddles her horse, loads her gun, and, accompanied by only her faithful dog, rides off to look for a piece of land she can call her own. She's tough, handy, independent, and courageous, the sort of down-to-earth person who can't understand "why people feel they should spend a lot of time sitting in a room discussing things like the weather when all they have to do is step outside and take a good look at it."

Although the first half of the book tends to plod rather than gallop, Armstrong does eventually hit a comfortable stride, and succeeds in bringing a female hero into the Wild West pantheon.

Yet another teenage girl wise beyond her years (and many of her elders) is the main character in Choral (Press Gang, 164 pages, $14.95 paper), by Karen McLaughlin. An unusual novel that alternates short prose chapters with short prose poems and interweaves various viewpoints and time frames, Choral centers on the mother-daughter relationship. The book is a testimony, the characters (who take turns narrating) all bearing witness to their own and one another's experiences. The unconventional format emphasizes the overlap among five generations of women, including Cora and her precocious daughter, Choral, and the cycles of their lives: marriages, births, deaths; abuse and blame, guilt and distress; and, eventually, a hard-earned understanding. As Choral says about her mother:

Even the young girl Tamuru in Philip Loren's Children of God (Black Moss, 222 pages, $12.95 paper) is a rebel -- despite the fact that she lives under Egyptian rule during the reign of Thutmosis and is considered little more than decorative property. The novel, billed as an epic action -adventure, revolves around Zadok, Tamuru's father and ruler of Gaza, and his attempts to keep the Egyptian conquerers, appeased. This struggle reaches crisis proportions when Thutmosis takes a fancy to Tamuru, who is in love with Shuah, a young leader much more appealing than the aging pharaoh. When Zadok learns that she has slept with Shuah, he locks her in prison, but she escapes and flees her father's domain in search of Shuah's camp.

The novel's exotic setting does not camouflage the predictability of the plot or the triteness of the themes. It does, however, emphasize yet again the similarity of human beings no matter what their culture or their time.

Two teenage sisters are at the center of Terry Carroll's No Blood Relative (Mercury, 240 pages, $15.95 paper). Marc Le Page is a 35-year-old vodka-slinging newsman trying to get his life together in a small Alberta town. He is divorced, depressed over the death of his daughter (from a drug overdose that might have been suicide), and often drunk. His life takes on purpose, however, when he covers what at first appears to be a routine story for the local paper. A young woman, Stephanie, dies in a car accident on a nearby rural highway -- an accident apparently resulting from a game of chicken between her car and an oncoming pick-up truck. The question Marc sets out to answer is why reporters are being kept away -under police orders. His prying leads to an involvement with Stephanie's twin, Teresa, and the plot takes off from there.

Carroll weaves an intriguing story of small-town corruption, both sexual and financial. Unfortunately, he lays it on a bit thick: by the time he's finished everyone is involved.

Teenagers also take center stage in R. G. Des Dixon's Tell Me Who You Are (ECW, 233 pages, $16.95 paper). Dixon, an education analyst who has worked as a teacher and school administrator, is also the author of the controversial Future Schools. Published in 1992, it analyzed current problems with the educational system and offered suggestions for solving them. Tell Me Who You Are takes these problems and suggestions and serves them up in the form of a novel. Obviously, a book with such a blatant social/political agenda runs the risk of being strident or boring. Fortunately, neither of these adjectives apply. Dixon has created characters, not political platforms. There are stereotypes, certainly (the high school principal, for one), but for the most part there are articulate, engaging people here.

David Halper is a lawyer-turned-teacher whose ideas about learning are in complete opposition to the "norm" advocated by the high-school administration -- and also by many of his colleagues. He believes that students have a right to know about issues that will affect their lives, even if those issues are not on the curriculum. Halper is a creative, dedicated teacher determined to make school relevant for his students. In his classes, abortion, pregnancy, homosexuality, divorce, and drug abuse are discussed openly; this, of course, causes major conflict with Fenton, the school principal.

What gives the novel its energy is not only Dixon's obvious conviction but also his device of having four of Halper's brightest students tell their own stories in the form of essays. (Considering how trite all the female characters are, it was probably a wise decision for Dixon to stick to male students here.) Halper directs all his classes to "tell me who you are," and the results are fascinating.

The weakest aspect of the book is its melodramatic ending. It's as if Dixon couldn't find a graceful way to exit the story, and the result feels contrived -- the one major false note in an otherwise thought-provoking, intense work.

The women are grown up and powerful in Ellen Frith's Man-S-Laughter (Oolichan, 265 pages, $14.95 paper). Raymonde, Elaine, and Mona share a friendship that goes back a long way. They have been around, seen a thing or four. The novel begins with Raymonde's arrest for the murder of her third husband, Michael. (She pushed him off a cliff in Wales.) The ingenious but cold-hearted mother of three seems to have a penchant for falling husbands: spouse number one fell off a subway platform, while spouse number two went flying out of a highrise window.

Upon Raymonde's incarceration in a Welsh jail, her three children are flown to Vancouver to be taken care of by the whining Mona and the abrasive Elaine. The story unfolds in flashback as these two try to figure out what possible motive Raymonde could have had for doing what she did.

Overall, there are witty moments (Elaine's take-no-shit attitude provides the best of these) but no real feeling. It's like eating potato chips for dinner -- they're tasty but not nourishing.

Finally, there is Thomas Wharton's Icefields (NeWest, 274 pages, $14.95 paper), in which all the characters, young or old, male or female, are secondary to the magnificent Arcturus Glacier in the Canadian Rockies: the "basic paradox: frozen flow." Wharton fuses geology, history, and poetic sensibility as he tells the story of Dr. Ned Byrne, who was trapped in the ice in 1898. Byrne is rescued -- but not from what is to become a lifelong obsession with the glacier and nearby Jasper, its gradual transformation from settlement to tourist town by the coming of the railroad.

Wharton impressively evokes the aweinspiring majesty, the dangerous but compelling beauty, of the icefields. They are time and movement in a physical form: evolution incarnate.