Readers will have met Gabrielle Allan in the author's previously published Drovers Road. She is the heroine of this new story by Joyce West, which again deals with life in New Zealand.

Vivacious Gabrielle, who tells the story, is now growing up, but her practical vein, love of horses, sheep and dogs is beginning to be influenced by romantic ideas and long thoughts of the future. At heart she is the same lovable Gabrielle, a friend of everyone, and she sees with a clear eye the developments and changes in the Allan family brought about by the marriage of her young uncle, Dunsany. The mood of the story and everything that happens in it is coloured by a mysterious and highly romantic discovery which Gabrielle makes during a visit to Cape Lost—the sheep station belonging to Great-uncle Garnet.

Perhaps the greatest value and interest of this writer's work derives from the fact that, in an age when so many books are written about teenagers and their problems in isolation, she records brilliantly and with considerable emotion all the aspects of family life as it affects three generations in New Zealand, and the characters that will stand out most clearly from this book for its younger readers will be, as in real life, those of the older people.

From the dust jacket