Till We Meet Again

La Krantz returns in peak form - with this extravagant tale of the fabulous de Lancel women. In the beginning - 1913, that is - there's Eve Coudert, the beautiful but innocent teen-aged daughter of a proper Dijon doctor. Eve's own brand of forbidden fruit is the wildly popular French music-hall theater: she runs away to Paris, renounces her family, and begins to sing there under an assumed name. The warbling stops with WW I, but she does meet and marry Paul de Lancel, a career diplomat and scion of the fabulous de Lancel vineyards in Champagne. Eve and Paul end up, of all places, in Los Angeles, where Paul is posted; there, they raise two gorgeous daughters, Delphine and Freddy, through the wild 20's and depressed 30's. The girls are just as untamed as their maman used to be: Freddy has a yen to fly, becomes a champion racer and stunt pilot, and runs off with a Sam Shepard-type WW I ace twice her age; Delphine is sent to Champagne to learn proper manners from her grandparents, but instead parlays a tour of a Parisian film studio into a wild affair with a director and a budding film career. When WW II comes, both girls are in the thick of it - Delphine trapped in Occupied France, but fighting to save her Jewish lover from death in a forced labor camp; and Freddy flying for the Air Transport Auxiliary in England, ferrying Spitfires from factory to airfield (she even tangles with a Messerschmitt once). After the war, Freddy and her new English husband start a cargo plane service in California, while Paul and Eve return to save the ravaged de Lancel vineyards, and Delphine has babies galore. There's plenty more (including the girls' evil but brutishly handsome half-brother, Bruno; and a certain handsome American flyer lurking over Freddy's artificial horizon), and Krantz dishes it out with gusto. The same old formula, of course, but plenty of new twists should have Krantz's admirers doing Immetmanns and loop the loops. (Kirkus Reviews)