THAT GIRL OF PIERRE'S,

by Robert Davis '03. Holiday House, 1948, 230 pp., $2.50.

This is the sort of book that usually comes under the heading "will appeal to older young people." Actually this unassuming story of a small French village right after the war should interest a somewhat less limited audience. The heroine is a fairy tale girl—brave, enchanting, wise beyond her seventeen years—but the village is made of more solid stuff, and its problems of material and spiritual rebirth after the Occupation are real.

Danielle Dufour, her small brother and her aged grandmother return to their little town of Arsac-le-Petit after four years of exiled wandering, to contend with ruined vineyards, shabby desolation, a love affair withered in bud, and a cheating, lying storekeeper who is tyrannizing over and robbing the villagers. How Danielle defeats the thieving storekeeper, regains the family fields, finds her parents and restores her love will be of most interest to the readers for whom the book is intended, but anyone would be interested in the story of the development of the village Cooperative and Health Center, and the growing awareness that the small independent farmer and the great proprietor must work together if the community is to survive and be strong.

Mr. Davis knows what he writes about. A New Englander by birth he has lived in France for many years, between tours of duty as a foreign correspondent and Red Cross commissioner returning to his own vineyard near Bordeaux, on the banks of the Gironde.