OMING SUMMER

The resounding success of Mary O'Hara's novels, My Friend Flicka, in particular, will provide the springboard for this personal record of life on the ranch where the scene of her fictional work is placed. There is much of the quality of the story telling, evident in the earlier works; much too of the animals about the ranch- the bull, restive at being confined; the setter, whose training began too late; the cat- and of course the horses. There's more of humor than in the novels, as she writes of the trial and error processes of getting the ranch established, of the dude ranch operation run for lively teen-age boys, of the often frustrating experience of trying to keep on with the music which had been her livelihood before her marriage to her would-be-rancher husband. There is more warmth and sensitivity here than, for instance, in Betty MacDonald's studiedly humorous The Egg and I, but it might well capture a cross section of that sort of market. The striking difference lies in the fact that Mary O'Hara loves Wyoming- the ranch- and her husband.