THE TOY SWORD

A different sort of Cinderella story, which starts with a car breakdown on a dusty back road in Portugal, and winds up with the ""ideal"" prospective bride out of the picture, and the wielder of the toy sword in control. Here's the kind of romance to make the oldsters feel young again. It is predictable in its major pattern and original in its colorful ingredients and the odd assortment of characters more or less accidentally brought together in transforming staid, proper Edmund Forth into a likable human being. Fran Nash is an interfering but delightful minx, with a heart bigger than her pocketbook. She undertakes mad ventures, and while they don't come out the way she planned them, somehow they make entertainingly frothy reading, for those moments that should not tax the brain.