While the idea of [The Girl in the Opposite Bed] is a worthy one, the plot is too slight to provoke much interest. Jane's awareness of her faults and consequent improvement to the point of liking the girl in the opposite bed develops so rapidly that it is not altogether credible. Though told in the first person, the narrator is obviously an adult interpreting a child's viewpoint and putting adult ideas into her head so that young readers may well be put off. The moral is pointed rather obviously to the detriment of characterisation. (pp. 184-85)

[The Girl in the Opposite Bed is a] perceptive book which appraises the character in the story objectively and may rouse some reader to wonder if she is like this. Jane is in hospital for an appendix operation. In the opposite bed is Jeannie but the two girls are poles apart in environment and knowledge of life…. Jane meets death while she is in hospital and is brought to realise Jeannie's need of help. She responds to these experiences but will her outlook on life be much changed when she returns to her comfortable home?

The daily life of a hospital is portrayed without glamour—this is how it is and it must be accepted. This is scarcely an enjoyable story, for Jane is not a likable character and the inevitable talk of illness and the suffering of the patients is naturally depressing. The book lacks the warmth and humanity of [The Longest Weekend].

Girls a few years younger than Emma will enjoy [Emma in Love]. They will like the descriptions of clothes and cooking meals and approve of a story where adults are mostly off stage. Teenage girls, whose romances have already gone beyond the chaste kisses and blameless secret meetings of Alastair and Emma, will be impatient with it. An adult reader can see the skill in linking up the two previous books so that new readers can "start here" and old ones are reminded of what happened before. It is a very sympathetic picture of adolescent ups and downs and of the agonized waiting and hasty decisions of young love, so vivid one week and so dead the next.