MIRACLE OF SAGE VALLEY

The problems of a sixteen-year-old girl in adjusting to her parents' divorce is the theme of this novel of love and horses, set in contemporary California. Evan Jones writes with compassionate understanding of Pat Regan's trembling confidence in the face of her family's crisis, and from the point of view of the heroine, her gradual return to security, based on a compensatory love and sympathy for animals, is convincingly presented. However, despite the author's ability adequately to expose the problems incurred by the child of a divorced home, and despite the wholesomeness of his approach to this delicate subject, there is something entirely too external in Pat's solution and too limited. For it is a resolution evolved, not so much from the logic of the situation, as from a particularly felicitous chain of fictional circumstances.