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THE BOY IN BLUE by Monica Stirling

THE BOY IN BLUE

By

Pub Date: Sept. 12th, 1955
Publisher: Coward-McCann

For that (feminine) audience which remembers Lovers Aren't Company, Dress Rehearsal and Ladies With A Unicorn, this is again a delicate diversion, and under her tender tutelage a difficult theme- the love of a young man for an older woman- is a tentative, gay, sad, radiant, and ultimately only grateful experience. For Laurente at 23, a song writer of considerable talent- and success, has been almost all alone in the world since the time when- as a youngster- the German massacre at St. Roch took his parents and his twin brother. With Mounette, to whom he tells this story- for the first time since it happened- he has a feeling of casual camaraderie, overshadowed by the memory of Marie-Louise de Brevanne whose exceptional beauty and considerable elegance have left him awkwardly infatuated after a single meeting. Resisting him, for a time, Marie-Louise finally allows Laurent to join her at Amalfi and Marie-Louise gives him the excitement of Italy-along with the excitement of a first love which is fully returned if in the knowledge that it cannot last. In Paris, she is the first to know that he is slipping away, that his protective affection for Mounette is a challenge she cannot counter, that her world can never be his- and there is the final moment of revelation when he realizes he has ""fallen in love with her too soon for himself, too late for her"".... Always a graceful stylist, Miss Stirling's sentimental story is disarming.