A Boy Who Runs Meets a Girl Anxious to Catch Up

The Girl of His Dreams by Harry Mazer (Crowell: $12.95; 214 pages; ages 12 and up).

“The Girl of His Dreams,” Harry Mazer’s 12th novel for young adults, is his second book about Willis Pierce, gritty protagonist of the fiercely realistic “The War on Villa Street.” Willis’ triumph in the earlier book was that despite the trials of his life--his father’s alcoholism, his pursuit by a gang--he persevered, a shadowy, street-wise loner whose sensibilities weren’t crushed by a tough life.

On the dust jacket of “The Girl of His Dreams,” Mazer writes that he wanted to follow up on Willis, see what gains he’d made toward a better life.

In “Villa Street,” Willis’ discovery of his athletic prowess--he’s a runner--was a kind of salvation. But has he stuck with running? Having left home at 18, what is Willis up to now and is he any happier? “In the back of my mind was the thought that if he had someone--the right person, a girl--he’d be all right,” the author concludes.

And so the novel opens with Willis preparing to go run, while obsessively speculating about his dream girl. He seems a gentle and romantic soul, listening to a lonely-hearts advice show on the radio, envisioning a girl he might love. He imagines the radio-show hostess admonishing him: “Remember, though, dreams are one thing. Reality is something else.”

Meets Farm Girl

Reality for Willis soon materializes in the unlikely guise of Sophie Browne, a big-boned, big-hearted puppy of a girl who has left her brother’s farm (her parents are dead; she’s 22) and come to the city to make her own way. Willis meets her at the newsstand where she works, ministers to her wounded hand when she accidentally injures herself, and by painstaking degrees he falls in love with her.

I say painstaking because Sophie Browne is smitten with Willie the moment she sees him. The initial inequality of their feelings is what gives the book its earliest and most dramatic tension. Sophie’s unabashed charm and generosity contrasted with Willis’ close-mouthed recalcitrance makes a reader feel like screaming: “Willis! Wake up!”

But Willis, used to rebuff, is disconcerted by Sophie’s warmth. She is an utterly untrendy girl who glows and gushes when something pleases her, who smiles, Willis notes, too broadly, who will just show up for no reason at all, bearing a plate of cookies. Her regard for him is simply too obvious, and this makes Willis cautious. She lacks the circumspection, the coolness that Willis expects from a dream girl. When he’s with her he feels almost too comfortable for love.

Sophie chafes against her overly demonstrative nature, but she realizes that it owns her. She is who she is. “She wasn’t cool. She was eager and she said things and sometimes people laughed at her. She laughed with them because what difference did it make . . . . She wished she could be like the pasture pond in first light, when everything was still and its surface was smooth as dark glass.”

Real Love Story

“The Girl of His Dreams” is mostly, undeniably, a love story. Gradually we see a loosening in Willis. His heart unclenches. He tends a hurt dog and makes friends with Benny Rinaldi, one of the slicker guys he works with loading freight. And he begins to notice when Sophie isn’t around. He misses her terribly when they’ve argued and separated. Ironically their arguments bring them closer and create the necessary mystery between them, the sense of “otherness” that inspires love.

Contrivances abound in this book, the way they do in fairy tales, but the happy ending feels earned. Harry Mazer writes deftly about the nature of adolescent yearning, both from a boy’s and girl’s perspective.

His machine-gun prose style is perhaps what keeps the book from seeming less sentimental than it probably is. But “The Girl of His Dreams” achieves a credibility apart from its fairy-tale ending, because Willis and Sophie are such dimensional characters.

Marianne Gingher’s novel, “Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit,” was recently issued in paperback (Ballantine). A story collection, “Teen Angel,” is forthcoming (Atheneum).