The plastic nature of the young girl wrought upon by life, fresh faculties brought into activity by the hard knocks of fate or the sunbursts of good luck--although these things are happening every day in the real life of young girls, we yet await the writer who will put them into literature without sentimentalizing. What we want is the novel simplified; the story told directly, without byways of description or analysis; where healthy young people, neither saints nor prigs, nor creatures of affectation, jealousy, or malice, are acted upon by life and each other in a natural fashion. Let boys and girls be brought together as in real life; brothers are a good element in girls' stories, and love affairs need not be excluded, if handled with delicacy, common sense and true feeling. Many books classed as novels are merely stories simply and clearly told, intended for older readers, but far better for young girls than the stories usually written for them. Miss Jeanie Gould Lincoln's stories and Mrs. J. G. Austin's historical novels, some of Mrs. Barr's and Mrs. Oliphant's novels and a wide range of other interesting, well-told stories can be substituted, if care and discrimination are used in the selection. Fortunately, too, many girls of twelve are ready for Dickens and other standard writers. However it is not only through the emotions that these aspirations and desires are ministered to--when the writer can develop this emotion into spiritual enthusiasm--or when she portrays a character of active spiritual force, she has put something valuable into the life of the reader. Here, as always, it is the personality of the writer--the soul back of the words that most counts, and it is just this quality of true spirituality which gives value to Mrs. Whitney's stories, in spite of their wordiness, lack of proportion and forced symbolism; as it is the genuine goodness and pure idealism of Miss Mulock which forms the very atmosphere in which her characters move. While it is impossible to offer a practical guide to the selection of books a few suggestions can be made. In the religious stories, for instance, there must be discrimination between those encouraging morbid self-examination or religious sentimentalizing, and those cultivating optimism and the perception of true values and ideals. In books of adventure the dividing line would fall between, on the one side, those stories where the hero is actuated by pure love of adventure or where the adventure is worth while in itself--as in "Foul play"; and, on the other side, those stories where the hero is merely seeking to exploit himself and in which the tendency might be to incite boys to reckless escapades for the sake of notoriety. In the _purchase_ of books one must consider the range of the average reader, but in _recommending_ books to the individual boy and girl, appreciation of differences in temperament and culture is indispensable.