New Novels

WE RIDE A WHITE DONKEY--George Panefta--Harcourf, Brace ($2).

When he was twelve, George Caparuta "used to go to Papa's shop and pat all the dress dummies on the behind" because at that age "there was no difference between them and the real girls." The same sense of values and propriety remains with George throughout this hilarious account of misadventures that befall him and his equally uninhibited family in an Italian colony on Manhattan's East Side.

FURLOUGH--Franz Hoellering -- Viking ($2.50).

A war-warped, Nazi-indoctrinated soldier at the Russian front goes A.W.O.L. by shooting a comrade and stealing his furlough papers. Back home, he finds enough spiritual dissolution to make him desert for good. Author Hoellering, an Austrian-born journalist, presents ordinary Germans with knowledgeable matter-of-factness.

VALLEY OF THE SKY--Hoberf Douglas Skldmore--Houghfon, Mifflin ($2).

The heroine of Valley of the Sky is the "Heartless Harpie," an ill-fated Liberator bomber assigned to the Pacific. To the ten crewmen who went down with her, she had been an animate being, detached and exalted, a distinct personality in which each of them had merged his own. This first novel by Hobert Douglas Skidmore, himself a turret gunner, is an awkward but often moving attempt to define this new identity by flashing back to the peacetime lives of the old ones it absorbed.

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