Le Grand Meaulnes is a striking and beautiful evocation of adolescence. Its poignant description of a young French schoolboy`s first love and his subsequent search for the young girl who inspired it realizes Alain-Fournier`s ambition to insert the marvelous into reality. Yet reality is never sacrificed for the luminous quality that infuses it: the characters are intensely alive; the winding country roads, peasant life, the cold bleak schoolhouse, the landscape, are brilliantly recaptured. A great strength of the novel lies in its profound psychological penetration, a breadth of insight that makes this much more than simply a novel about adolescence. Le Grand Meaulnes is deservedly a classic of modern French literature.