At nineteen, from the university, Dorothy looks back [in Because of Madeline] to the year when she was a fourteen-year-old student at a co-educational private school near Central Park. Christmas holidays brought a change to her life, to her brother and "the rest of us" because of Madeline, the brilliant gum-chewing daughter of a cleaning woman who entered the school on scholarship. How, because Madeline was an individual and the first non-conformist the students had met, she affected their thinking and made them willing to be less alike is a significant theme, characteristic of this author. Dorothy, who wanted everyone to be happy; her quixotic boarding-school brother; his roommate; and Celia, a less different scholarship girl, are well revealed through changes wrought by the catalyst Madeline who had no wish to change herself "except by her own rules." Fresh and rewarding reading, with clear, intense, and natural views...