Junior high school students often dream of the freedom and accompanying excitement of belonging on a university campus. The Terrible Temptation is meant for these young readers….

Honor Arundel has written a book about a college-age girl with the mental and social capacities of a young adolescent. By adult reading standards, The Terrible Temptation is merely terrible. Janet Meredith flits from an important lecture to a pub date to her boyfriend's room to her own room at Aunt Aggie's to the ostentatious home of a college girl friend with breathless facileness. Janet's egocentric world is all lights and shadows. And Janet spends as little time as possible in the shadows.

But, by young adolescent standards, The Terrible Temptation may be an appropriate choice. The younger adolescent girl who wants to taste the collegiate experience will be delighted with the pace at which Jan Meredith races through life. Honor Arundel is at her best describing dismal third floor walk-ups transformed into inviting apartments by imaginative use of paint and cheap fabrics and the electric enjoyment transmitted between members of a pub crowd listening to an excellent folk singer. If there are any students at Edinburgh University who are seriously interested in getting an education, Janet does not meet them.

The younger adolescent reader will understand Jan's ambivalent attitude toward her boyfriend Thomas and may be truly concerned about Jan's predicament with Aunt Aggie at the end of the novel. Should Jan cancel her vacation plans because of Aunt Aggie's illness? The author raises a very important question about Jan's personal responsibility. I don't think a thoughtful reader will finish the novel totally in sympathy with Jan Meredith.

The Terrible Temptation is an excellent example of a novel written for a specific level of adolescent social development. I think adolescent readers at that level will thoroughly enjoy it.

Miss Arundel chronicles the decay [of the Douglas family in A Family Failing] with subtlety and understanding. For once in a children's book, if it can be called a children's book, the parents are major characters, entirely in the round. It is a family story in a rare sense, a book about the way we wound each other and need each other, and about the fact that there is no real escape from wounding and needing. The commune, to which Joanna and her brother flee, is as full of demands and difficulties as any family. Highly circumstantial, the book is rich in the quiddities of one section of contemporary society. Readers, whether recognizing a familiar world or exploring an alien one, will find much to stimulate their minds.