In this fourth and final installment of Elizabeth Corbett's Graper Girls series, sisters Marian, Ernestine and Beth, whose high school adventures are recorded in The Graper Girls, while their college experiences are chronicled in The Graper Girls Go to College and Growing Up With the Grapers, discover life after school. This being 1936, by and large this means romance and marriage. Marian, engaged to Tubby Williams at the end of the previous volume, is quietly married in Mount Airy, settling down in more modest circumstances with her new professor husband. Although she narrates only one of the nine chapters, perhaps explaining why this entry in the series is entitled Beth and Ernestine Graper, her experiences as a newlywed - the pleasures of the honeymoon period, the challenges of setting up her own establishment (with Daddy's help, of course) in a charming old farmhouse - and as a mother to twin boys, William Llewelyn, Jr. and Ernest (AKA Ding and Dong), are central to the book. Ernestine, although still determined to go east, agrees to a year as a graduate student at the University in Madison, feeling all the while like a bit of a bird out of water. Eventually succeeding in her aim of living in New York, she becomes a modern young working girl, finding a job as a marketer at a department store, and sharing an apartment with another girl in Manhattan. Here she draws closer to Stanley Davis, the older man with whom she had been intermittently involved in previous books, but the surprise arrival on the scene of her hometown friend Bob Hammond, now working as an intern at one of the city's hospitals, soon puts everything into perspective. Beth, after finishing her senior year at university, begins to seriously pursue her dream of becoming a professional tennis player, devoting herself to practice and competition. When not on the court, she finds herself managing some of her sister Marian's problems. Although imagining that she will be the Old Maid of the three Graper Girls, Beth too finds love, in the form of Craig Walsingham, a New York man she meets while competing in a national tennis competition.

Like its predecessors, Beth and Ernestine Graper is a lighthearted read - a friend has described reading this series as being akin somehow to wallowing in a vat of marshmallow fluff, and I would tend to agree - one that skims happily along the surface of its subjects' lives, without ever delving too deep. The Graper Girls are daughters of immense privilege, living in a happy world that seems wholly untouched by the economic crises going on at the time (1936) the book was published. Nary a mention is made of the Great Depression, or of the drastic effects it had upon the nation and the world, and while the girls do encounter some financial realities - Marian discovers it is no easy thing to make do on Tubby's salary - these are small, "luxury" problems, easily solved by appealing to their father. The notions of gender and of romance that are presented are conventional, and are not significantly challenged in the story. Although the equal intelligence of women is championed by all three of the Grapers (one of the few progressive themes in Corbett's work), in areas such as financial and emotional well-being it is understood that women need to be looked after by men - even the independent Ernie, with her dreams of being a working girl in New York City, has her family wealth and connections to protect her, and the reader never gets the sense that her sojourn as a department store employee will be anything other than temporary - and all three of the girls are married by the end of the book. Despite its shallowness, or perhaps in part because of it, this is an entertaining read, painting a fascinating portrait, perhaps not of how women lived, but of how they desired to live, or were encouraged to live, during the 1930s. Having followed along with Marian, Ernestine and Beth since their high school days, the reader is rewarded with a happy ending for each. Recommended primarily to readers who have enjoyed the previous Graper Girls books, as well as to anyone interested in vintage American girls' series from the first half of the twentieth-century. ( )