BOOKS

FAIR GAME

by Clement Wood and Gloria Goddard, Beacon, 1958, 187 pp.

The blurb on the front of this paperback book reads "A Novel of Those Who Defy Convention!" On the back, a short paragraph about each of the four girls makes me think that one of them's a lesbian.

Sure enough, one of the four stories is a lesbian one. I don't care if the girl ends by committing suicide or renouncing the horrible life of lesbianism for one of happy marriage with the boy who really loves her. All I want is some escape reading.

Well, in this case, the story is slightly different. The girl, being a thoroughly despicable character to begin with, takes to lesbianism like cliches to the story. She's almost immediately courted and won by one dress designer who initiates her into the "warped pleasures of the twilight world." When kicked out of that one's home, she finds another dress designer on whom she can leech and begins to look forward to the day when, she too, can support a woman.

Despite the fact that the characters are hateful people, I'll read a lesbian novel with interest because I'm not mainly seeking noble characters or happy endings, although it would be nice. I'm looking for plain escape reading. The characters in this (and about 50 other soft-bound books) are so unreal, it annoys me. The persons who wrote this were not only not lesbians, but never saw, heard of, or read about any lesbians. The homosexual women behave just as

one

would. One of the sentences in the book-"Amy acted just like a man trying to make a girl" was only too accurate. I couldn't get any escape reading out of this book. The characters are just too faked. I didn't see red over the nasty portrayals because they're just too unlife-like. One thing about this book-I wouldn't worry. it's influencing heterosexuals adversely because they'll never finish reading it. And I wonder why I did. A. H.

THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP

by Vin Packer, Gold Medal, 1958, 192 pp.

The pattern of the Leopold-Loeb case is repeated with the matricide committed by two teen-age girls in England. Vin Packer unfolds the story in a series of incidents concerning the two girls' meeting and subsequent friendship. Interspersed are excerpts from the girls' diaries which helps to reveal their imaginative and weird fantasy life. Statements made at the trial by witnesses, the two psychiatrists (one court-appointed, the other defense) and the girls themselves are also sprinkled throughout the story.

The Evil Friendship does not quite "come alive" for the reader and the two girls remain throughout the book, fascinating but unreal characters. The girls' families, school associates, and the other people who pressure and warp them into retreating more and more into their own private world are very must cardboard figures. None of the minor characters are real.

Too many questions are left in the reader's mind as to whether many of the important events in the story were purely in the girls' fantasies or real incidents which they wove into their lives. Perhaps it was Vin Packer's intent to have the reader make his own decision concerning these events. This is good, but there were just a few too many ambiguous situations. It is prob-