PENNY LAVENDER

St. Paul its frontier days is the new home of Penny Lavender of pamper Southern wealth. From Creole cooking and the easy living in her New Orleans city, Fenny, newly orphaned, goes to make her home with her only relation, an uncle who on an Army post in the vicinity of St. Paul. The family life of the new settlers, Basco, introduces Penny to a different kind of happiness. Frontier country, the Mississippi River, the early social life of St. Paul, the mixtures of people and cultures -- this is interesting material and will make worthwhile supplementary reading. The story is too loosely held together for sustained interest, and the problems of lost and found wealth, of growing up, of the romances of those about her, do not reader. The age level for the book really bridges this group and the next.