When Kate Summers came to live with the Tuttles as a "family helper" she had quite made up her mind that good sense was her portion. In this world, thought Kate, if you were cute and pretty nothing was expected of you but that. You might even get into the movies! But as an angular red-headed freckle-faced orphan couldn't possibly be considered cute, sensibleness was the only alternative. Kate was very sensible.

Yet there were other people in the small seaside town who seemed to have other ideas about sense and about cuteness too. There were Nora and Christopher Cline—they didn't have a lick of sense, especially Nora, but it was Nora who told Kate her very first secret. There there was Vic Corsatti. "Do you envy Beverly Jean?" Kate asked him after the first miserable day of school. "Gosh, no," Vic said. "She gives me a pain." And there was Vic's brother Leo who didn't have much sense the way Kate meant it and yet Kate loved him almost as much as Vic did.

The sea winds blow through this story. Doris Gates knows what it feels like to have sand in one's shoes, and to hear the gulls sweep and cry above the fishing boats. And the lessons Kate learned about the world and its ways, that sense and nonsense both have their part in happiness, will be understood by small girls the whole world over.

From the dust jacket