Missy

A Midwestern town, an outspoken girl growing up in it, and every mortifying, funny, gradual step from schoolroom to grown-up life. Gatlin was a Kansas City journalist who published in McClure's and the big magazines of the twenties; Missy is drawn without the archness that usually gets applied to girls in fiction — she is allowed to be ridiculous, and allowed to be right. Sixty plates of girls and boys at work and play, from Winslow Homer to Mary Cassatt, match Missy's passage from childhood to grown-up life.