While the war stories are sensitively drawn, they are trivialized by the lighter comic tone of the storytelling.

While many of the smaller roles are played as caricatures and Ms. Perlman delivers her lines with a loud-mouthed, sitcomy sense of timing, Mr. Starr's Shorty is a sensitively drawn portrait of a young man at risk.

Atkinson, whose first book, the sensitively drawn family novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, appeared here in 1996, understands that over time the sins of the parents are offset by the sins of the child.

Unlike other surviving illustrated fragments of papyrus, such as the Romance Papyrus and the Heracles Papyrus, which have illustrations that are little more than mere sketches, the Charioteer Papyrus is sensitively drawn and finely colored.

As she bakes a pie - from scratch, mind you - Ms. Wiest performs the still more challenging feat of keeping our sympathies keenly attuned to the appealing emotional undercurrents in Ms. Tolan's slight but sensitively drawn two-hander (1:30).

But if Ms. Wexler's dry narrative robs some of the events of their inherent drama, her overall portrait is illuminating and sensitively drawn.

Individually, the characters are sensitively drawn.

Boundaries warp and melt in the dense urban heat that pervades Richard Nelson's sensitively drawn portrait of love in the age of J. D. Salinger.

Misty is Palahniuk's second attempt at a female protagonist (the first, from "Invisible Monsters," was a fashion model with a mutilated face), and she's one of his most human, sensitively drawn narrators.

Mitsukoshi, the giant Japanese department store chain, soon discovered the appeal of Ms. Midda's sensitively drawn and thoughtful bits of old-fashioned lore about gardening, fruits and vegetables.