SALLY ON FENCE

Quite an adult story of a musical girl from a broken household hits at an older age level than Clarice Pont's earlier stories (Three-Times Easier, 1951 p. 127 and No School on Friday, 1953 p. 581) and keeps the characteristic seriousness of her work. Sally at 15 has had a full life in New York with her artistic mother and faces a good many frustrations and misunderstandings when she goes after her mother's death to live with her father, a small town doctor in Iowa who had remarried after the divorce years before. A two-way resentment builds itself up. Sally's younger stepbrothers and sisters look at her as the daughter of ""Lillian"", the woman to whom Daddy had to send checks. Kind, gentle Madge, her stepmother, is sure Sally's silent, well-mannered obedience is a cover for something else. While Sally herself feels unwanted and in desperate need of a piano. When practising in her high school gym she encounters Franz, a German D.P. boy, who is a pianist too- but through him, more misfortunes. For she is forbidden on moral grounds to go with alone him to his house to practise and measles prevent them from playing in a school concert. But sensing the situation all along, Sally's father takes things in hand and his understanding yet realistic explanation for the divorce knocks the chip off her shoulder and brings her the rewards of music and friendship by way of a new love for her new family.