Girl Meets Mole

APRIL WAS WHEN IT BEGAN--Barry Benefield--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

Lula Horgos was a gawky, lonely twelve-year-old who lived in a seedy brownstone front on Manhattan's West Side. Her father, a spiritualist, called her Dik-Dik (after the royal Abyssinian antelope). Neighbor kids called her Spooky Sloppy Lula. One day Dik-Dik saw a solemn, horse-faced young man coming down the street--the answer to a maiden's seance. Lula charged, threw her arms around his waist. "I'm Dik-Dik," she said. The stranger, who hailed from South Brooklyn, had a "heart as clean as a baby's," was the fourth deputy assistant editor in a publishing firm. He told her his name was Mole, agreed to come to her house to live. Thus begins April Was When It Began, a complicated romance in which Dik-Dik tends a poor author's baby, breaks up Mole's engagement to a rich Irish girl, ages two years in time, ten years in feminine finesse. John Barry Benefield's new novel is cut to the same master pattern as his previous successes (The Chicken-Wagon Family, about 50,000 copies; Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, over 75,000 copies). Like them, it should please readers willing to "enter upon a surprising and beautiful adventure" wherein dream girls are "spirited, but with moderation, in the classic way." Like his hero, Mole, slight, whimsical Novelist Benefield has been a publisher's editor. Before that he was handyman in his father's Texas feed store, a reporter on Texas and Manhattan newspapers, an advertising copy writer. Now in his late fifties (he says he is "eleven going on twelve"), Author Benefield commutes three days a week from suburban Peekskill, N. Y. to Manhattan to read manuscripts for his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock. He still speaks with an oldtime Texas drawl.

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