THE NEXT FINE DAY

While ostensibly written for adults, this seems definitely young adult in its simplicity and slightness of penetration. Kent, a boy who calls himself ""Mr. Nobody"", reflects his mother's desire to lock the door on her past when her American aviator husband is killed. They had had four radiant years; only after his death did she learn that back home in America there were marital entanglements. She was not entitled to his pension. And so the widowed mother and small son came back to Chilham on the Kentish Downs for good. That an artist, John Rivven, should happen there-and change the pattern she had set up, and that he was able to give young Kent new directions and to convince his mother that her determination was wrong, makes a heart-warming story in an old fashioned tradition.