Books by Betty Cavanna have been among the most popular with young high school readers. Her principal characters are adolescent girls, her setting is the environs of Philadelphia, and her theme usually is the struggle of an adolescent girl to gain self-confidence. Of her five or six novels, one, Going on Sixteen, is noteworthy. The others are neither better nor worse than the dozens of innocuous girls' stories which have flowed from the press in recent years.

Going on Sixteen is compounded of the humdrum in adolescent life. It rests upon its genuineness and sincerity rather than upon melodrama. Julie, the heroine, is a somewhat shy, nondescript girl who lives on a farm with her father and commutes to the town high school by bus. The story carries her through three years of high school to a point where she has apparently "found herself." The theme of the novel, although familiar, is handled well. The author avoids the easy assumptions present in many books with a similar theme, including others by herself. Boys, though they have a place in Julie's life, are not the magic medium through which she suddenly blossoms. Julie does not go to the prom with the football captain or with any "dreamy" new boy who moves to town; nor does any aunt come to visit who teaches Julie how to dress and change her personality. Julie does not blossom at all; there is no metamorphosis, but there is realistic evolution of character brought about by Julie's own efforts and recognition of her faults and by the sympathetic guidance of a teacher.

Miss Cavanna's principal general strength lies in the perception with which she presents adolescents together. Her best scenes, notably in Spring Comes Riding and Going on Sixteen, are those in which groups of adolescents are at dances, movies, or in drugstores, situations in which the unique social mores and conventions of adolescence are in operation. In Going on Sixteen the freshman dance scene is a bit of rare artistry.

Miss Cavanna is weakest perhaps in her treatment of family relations and in characterization. Her fathers and mothers, except in Going on Sixteen, where the father is a well-drawn individual, run to stereotypes. The mothers are young, attractive, and laden with patient wisdom; the fathers are intelligent, somewhat indulgent, and in a state of mild frustration with their daughters, who wheedle them. Real family problems do not exist. Miss Cavanna is inclined to categorize her characters and then proceed to the business of the story…. It is difficult to create a really believable adolescent in fiction, because in personality the adolescent, even more than the adult, is now one thing and now another. (pp. 164-65)