AMY AND LAURA

Girls who are waiting for further news of Amy and Laura will be happy to find that Mama is able to come home from the hospital after a year's stay. Amy, lively and pragmatic, rushes to the wheelchair to tell Mama all about her problems. Laura, however, is appalled by the heavy woman with gray in her hair and a clumsy steel brace: this is not the Mama she had pictured for so long. And Mama seems to have changed inside, too. When Laura, a conscientious monitor, reports Amy for laughing and talking on the stairs, Mama condemns her for disgracing HER OWN SISTER and rejects the principle involved. For the first time in her life, Laura knows that Mama is wrong. Warned not to upset Mama by controversy, she begins to withdraw from the family. Only when the two girls erupt in a slapping and scratching battle does Mama realize the wall they have built around her and she begins to assume her former place in family affairs. Laura accepts Amy's newly-discovered smartness, which rivals her own, and finds out that she is becoming as attractive in her own way as Amy. Individual incidents are the happy heart of the story: Amy torn between naming sweet, steadfast Rosa or mercurial, daring Cynthia as her Best Friend; Laura struggling to stay on a bike and her elation when she succeeds. This does not have the structural unity of Laura's Luck, but girls who have identified with Amy and Laura in their earlier ups-and-downs will not be disappointed. Amy and Laura remain individuals struggling to reconcile their identity with the inward and outward pressures of growing up. Contemporary, lively, questioning—a superior serial.