VIEW FROM A WINDOW

This is nice, perhaps not quite as fresh as Green Entry, but still perfect pop, an engaging, liberal love story and some exciting horse material. There is Janet, getting over a triple knockout, a divorce, the loss of her concert career through an injury to her hand, and the death of her brother in the R.A.F. She takes his horse, McTavish, to California to train him for the Ventana Gran Nacional steeplechase, partly as an escape, partly to carry out his wishes. There she meets Richard, ex-writer, ex-professor, with a sometimes sardonic outlook, avoiding the world and concentrating all he's got on a black stallion. They fall in love, live together, train their horses together, but Pearl Harbor brings a break-up when Janet gets annoyed by his detachment from the current crisis. She runs away, he scratches his own horse to race hers himself, an accident in which the horse is killed;-- all this to bring them together. Easy, likable reading -- which should do well.