Spunky heroines: I've lived my life since girlhood wanting to be one and to this day they remain my preferred characters in fiction. But, in reading these two new novels, Them That Glitter and Them That Don't [by Bette Greene] and The Callender Papers [by Cynthia Voigt], I missed that familiar frisson of identification with the protagonists of either book. This isn't, I hasten to add, simply because I'm from the wrong age-group, or I don't think it is; certainly, I continu...

Less ambitious than Voigt's other novels, [The Callender Papers] conforms to an established juvenile-fiction genre, but it is a superior example of its type. Written in the first person with a touch of period primness, it's the story of Jean Wainwright's 13th summer in 1894, which she spends away from Aunt Constance, the admirable girls'-school headmistress who raised her, in the employ of wintery Mr. Thiel, the widower of Aunt Constance's girlhood friend Irene Callender. ...

In "Bleak House," Charles Dickens gave us Mrs. Jellyby, who took such a charitable interest in far-away Borrioboola-Gha that she failed to notice when her own wretched children were falling down the stairs. Cynthia Voigt [in "A Solitary Blue"] has created a contemporary version of Mrs. Jellyby, an equally appalling mother-philanthropist…. (p. 34)

[Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers] is heavy going…. After a sluggish start, during which the girls get acquainted (eventually they develop a strong bond of friendship and respect), there is lots of volleyball action as that sport becomes the center of the girls' lives their first semester. The story offers a good look at adjusting, coping, and competing to win. But it is thick with philosophy as each girl presents her background and view of life. The girls talk like very intelligent college st...

Written in a purposefully detached style, early sections of [A Solitary Blue] read like a journalistic case-study of child neglect. The confrontation with [Jeff's mother], Melody, which would seem to be the climax, comes quite early in the book, and further chapters, while necessary to show Jeff's ultimate resolution of his relationship with his parents, are choppy, episodic and disconnected. The last section, in which he meets Dicey Tillerman and her family [from Voigt's earlier books]...

Uncovering what the past has hidden, Jean [in "The Callender Papers"] finds the present menacing. Thinking carefully, as she has been taught to do, doesn't protect her from the evil she meets in life for the first time. She learns that what lies beneath the surface in people is not always what one imagines as she slowly pieces together what is really going on…. As in her Dicey Tillerman books, Cynthia Voigt gives us a spunky young heroine forced into precocious independence and r...

The strong characterization of Homecoming … to which [Dicey's Song is a sequel is one of the most trenchant facets again, in this story of the four children who live with their grandmother on the Eastern Shore of Maryland…. [Dicey's Song] is much more cohesive than Homecoming, in part because the physical scope is narrower, in part because the author has so skillfully integrated the problems of the individual children in a story that is smoothly written. Dicey learns how to make ...

An eastern college for women of high ability is the setting for [Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers], an unusual teenage novel about three disparate freshmen who come together as room-mates in 1961…. Volleyball becomes their common ground as Hildy, who has an almost mystical impact on her teammates, coaches and leads the freshmen toward the championship. Vivid imagery vies with effectively subtle understatement in a thoughtful multiple-character study written in the third person but filled with introsp...

Fluent but never terse, the author compounds the mystery [that is the center of The Callender Papers] with a multitude of details and digressions, some of which border on melodrama. And Jean, so young in years, may strain the reader's credulity with her mature, self-possessed first-person account, which occasionally dips into fairly complex moral, and even philosophical, discussions. Ethel L. Heins, in a review of "The Callender Papers," in The Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 59, ...