A TIME OF GROWING

The stories in this collection may evolve out of an older generation's experience but even today's teenybopper should relate to the problems, pangs and pleasures of a young girl's Time of Growing. The adolescents here face the terrors of a first social coming-out, usually at a dance with (a) no escort, (b) an unfilled program,(c) the wrong boy, (d) worst of all...father as escort; the agonies of first love, the mystery of death; the discomforts of a sense of estrangement from family. They agonize over their appearance, suffer the initiation rites of being the new girl in school, occasionally court disaster in that first sexual awakening and are sometimes cruel, sometimes honestly angelic. The young Feminine Mystique has been exceptionally well recorded here by writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Jessamyn West, Reynolds Price, Shirley Jackson, Emily Hahn, Robert Lowry and Hildegarde Dolson.