Mary Stolz is a consistently modern writer for young people. But she should no more be classed as a "teenager's" writer than—say—Katharine Brush in her day. Miss Stolz' characters may be in the teen to 20 group, but her approaches and her techniques are mature, skillful, and poised. The nine short stories in this collection [The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories] are carefully polished little gems.

And Miss Stolz is modern because she knows that many college students commute by airplane, some girls do marry in the teenage bracket and that it's no longer square to study in college and quote from semi-obscure poets. Yet the stories that are so up-to-date in framework might benefit from a little old-fashioned, raw emotion. All the heroines have problems which are solved in the end. Not happily, necessarily, but satisfactorily. And perhaps it is that very quality of predestination (Miss...