All on a Summer's Day

This lightweight but appealing romance, English writer Gardiner's debut, opens in 1936 in England, when its two heroines, Miranda Whittaker and Natalie Ellenberg, are 14; at its conclusion they are 60. Gardiner traces the vicissitudes of their friendship as it is affected by the events of the turbulent era in which they mature. Natalie, Jewish and a gifted pianist, goes to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. She stays too long, is picked up by the Gestapo and sent to Saint-Denis, Drancy and finally Auschwitz. Miranda, widowed soon after her marriage, becomes a Red Cross volunteer. Trained as a medic, she is sent to Europe with a team eventually assigned to Auschwitz, where she finds her old friend near death, saves her life and gets her back to England. Gardiner's style is better suited to describing Natalie's love affair in a Paris attic than the horrors of Auschwitz. She does a creditable job, however, of conveying British class differences--especially through revealing dialogue between Miranda and her not-quite-respectable mother. (June)