A month ago J. D. Salinger told the story of what happened to a sixteen-year-old boy in the three days' interval between his dismissal from a private school and his return to his parents' home in New York's Park Avenue, ill and in a state of mental and physical shock. "Catcher in the Rye" is rapidly climbing toward the top of the best seller lists, and now it seems likely that Madeleine L'Engle's latest novel, which is concerned with two weeks in the life of a fifteen-year-old Park Avenue girl, may follow in its steps. There is a remarkable similarity in these two diverse books. Both are told in the first person, and both are concerned with the problems of a sensitive adolescent faced suddenly with the necessity of crossing the dividing line between childhood and maturity.

Miss L'Engle's "Camilla Dickinson" has more innate strength and stability than...