I TAKE THEE, SERENITY

The first two novels in the ""Kendall Trilogy"" appeared in 1950 and 1954 and in this latest, Miss Newman again utilizes her curiously isolated Rhode Island Quaker community as a font of renewal and peace for the troubled. College students Rennie (Serenity) and Peter are ill at ease with their sex-without-marriage and even more so with the plans for a grand, if hurried, wedding. But then Rennie, infatuated with the idea of a simple ceremony, visits her elderly Quaker cousin Oliver and his radiant, crippled wife. Gradually both Rennie and Peter begin to understand the importance of ""waiting,"" of quietly inviting divine guidance, of becoming independent enough to give rather than take--and at the close there's that meaningful wedding, and love abounds even among the skeptical in-laws. A gentle, dated tale which will take thee to dreamless sleep.