MR. Drang N. Osten, the promising young author who published "Big Man on Campus" in 1934 has turned to the college enviroment again as the background for a tender and beautiful novel, dealing with a highly emotional graduate student in a woman's college who had to use the museum and library of a neighboring male institution for her research. More fundamentally, however, Mr. Osten has faced squarely the problem which Leap Year presents to young women one time in every four years.

The heroine, Gertrude Murphy, is preparing a doctoral dissertation on the relation of fine arts to history; consequently she is forced to use the facilities of both the museum and library for her research. The problem arises when fatally beautiful Gertrude falls in love with Reggie Burlingame, young fine arts instructor and playboy, while at the same time she has become the despair of poor but honest Gregory P. Grupp, assistant at the delivery desk in the library. With telling power the author depicts the struggle that tears the heart of the girl when Leap Year arrives and she knows she must ask one or the other for good and all. With intense symbolism he reduces all humanity into one molten mass and pours the whole over the stones that obstruct the way of this simple girl. In passages of lyric beauty he describes the tender scenes on the bench before the ivy covered library, and with equal power, the metropolitan night life that the heroine finds in the company of the irrepressible Reggie. The conclusion is the only possible one for such a situation and Osten presents it steruly, fiercely, intensely-suicide.