HALFPENNY LINDA

ile it is easy enough to find fault with this young romance and its too obvious pattern, the parts are much better than the whole. Linda is a spoiled young Californian, virtually booted from her High School where she had wasted her time and her perfectly good abilities. And at the start in England- her mother's girlhood some- she doesn't do much better in the Lady Phillippa Grammar School for Girls. It takes some hard knocks and bad missteps before she snaps out of her critical self-centered self and becomes a nice and reasonable teen ager. In the process, both Linda and young teen readers learn a lot about differences between England and America. It would have been a better book- though perhaps a less popular one- if young Cambridge students had not appeared on the scene and found two sixteen-year-olds irresistible.... Take the good along with the mediocre.