JOAN AND MICHAEL

This is the best story Martin Gale has written. She is improving her grasp of plot, her situations, her characterizations. She still has something to learn about style and pace, where there is an amateur feel to the writing. This is a story of two youngsters whose parents have married, and who start out with a certain sense of mutual distrust and dislike and who get in deeper and deeper through a long eventful summer. There is no particular plot, except the working out of the human adjustment problem, but she manages to sustain suspense and to make ones sympathies veer from boy to girl and back.