[Who Wants Music on Monday? is a] quite wonderful book. The individual characters are drawn with sharp perception; relationships between characters are described with the rarely found combination of deep and intelligent insight and that seemingly easy flow of prose that marks the craftsman. Cassie is a thorny, gawky fourteen; blazing with integrity, she resents the easy charm of her older sister, Lotta. Lotta is a case-history belle, a vain and pretty creature who blithely uses people. Their brother and his Negro roommate are concerned about their goals: about marriage, about race relations. Perhaps the most penetrating analysis is seen in the mother of the family, a woman of limited intellect, bewildered by her children, bored by her life, aimlessly unhappy. The changes in all their lives are realistic: Lotta falls in love with a man who finds her boring and rejects her; Cassie finds security in the...