QUEEN OF DIAMONDS

Frankly, we found this an embarrassingly pretentious teen age romance. Granted the prevailing standards are not as high as they might be, it seems unnecessary to couple a high school senior prone to writing verse and an idealistic young teacher, who sees in her ""this girl that is different"", ""the most gifted young poet in the country"". The reader is hard put to it to find substantiation of this claim- and neither the girl as a poet nor the teacher as a critic emerges. Their fragile romance is backgrounded by a wicked invalid mother who declares it ""was not always thus"" -- that a birth injury condemned her to a wheel chair -- and who provides a smashing psychological denouement by hurling herself to her death. A California setting for a negligible effort.