RACE THE WILD WIND

Marty Conover, whose father runs a ski lodge, and whose older sister won three Olympic medals, is a real Valkyrie on skis herself even though she carries lots of tonnage. She's also a defiant suicide risk and well aware that she's unhappy, and unstable -- long before Garth Falkner, once crippled and now teaching handicapped children, tries to help her and simultaneously falls in love with her. As Garth tells her, ""You're a born loser with the killer instinct"" but until he comes along she has never acknowledged that her trouble is not just being subsidiary to her older sister but that it's connected with her brother's death on the slopes some years earlier. Before Marty learns to reconcile all this with some of the right reasons for winning-or losing- there have been some exciting action sequences brushed with the near-tragedy of a friend.... Mrs. Walden has managed to synchronize and equalize the motivation behind the problem at hand with the momentum of the sport itself and her story has a good deal of stamina and sympathy.