Jane Purdy is fifteen and a sophomore in high school. No one has ever asked her for a date except George, an unromantic boy who is an inch shorter than she is and talks of nothing but his rock collection. Then she meets Stan: tall, good-looking, resourceful and sixteen years old-all she ever dreamed of. The circumstances are trying. Jane is baby-sitting for Sandra Norton, the toughest assignment in town. Stan appears just in time to prevent Sandra, by a skillful use of pig Latin, from emptying a bottle of ink onto the Nortons' blond living-room carpet. But I'll never see him again, Jane tells herself despairingly the next day. I'm just not the type to interest an older man. And then one evening the telephone rings....

No reader can fail to share Jane's breathless excitement or the shattering ups and downs of her friendship with Stan. Because Jane's problems are their own, girls approaching fifteen will take her to their hearts. So will everyone who has ever been fifteen.

How Jane emerges from the agonizing awkwardness of adolescence is the theme of a book whose humor matches that of Mrs. Cleary's earlier stories and whose warm understanding carries it to a new height. It is hard to think of any other American writer who has so successfully put on paper the sorrows and joys and absurdities of girlhood.