O WESTERN WIND

High calibre woman's novel, with full emotional values sharpened up by intelligent writing and concerned with new situations, new problems, in the story of four English evacuees and their children who come to America during the Blitz. There is Mary, young, gentle, dependent, about to have her second baby; Daphne, cold and shrewish, and realizing that she's missed out; Margaret, intense, sometimes high, sometimes low; and Cora, with the greatest beauty and vitality, whose marriage to Paul had been free, wary, brittle, and doublestandard. Eventually they are all moved in together, find the difficulties of maintaining a common level, of hiding a growing prickliness at being on the receiving end, of skirting Daphne's outright bitchiness. The climax comes when Cora, who had used American Jimmy as an answer to Paul's blondes, hears that Paul is dead. But Paul is rescued, appears suddenly, and they make up for the lost years of fencing sophistication, while Mary returns to England to a blinded husband. This should find an audience.