Old Pybus is guilt-free romance

If Old Pybus had been written by someone other than Warwick Deeping, the story could have dissolved into sentimental claptrap.

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Clear portrait emerges painlessly from tiny bits

Christabel Craine is an attractive young woman with modest talent for writing and enormous talent for making people think she deserves to be worshiped….Like a Monet painting, the little bits of this Anne Parrish easy-reading novel add up to an insightful portrait.

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Annie Spragg Is Understated Gem

If you can imagine a novel written by Alfred Hitchcock, you’ll understand the fascination of Louis Bromfield’s 1928 bestseller The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg.Bromfield increases the fascination of the story by his squeaky-clean presentation. Readers grasping for clues can’t be sure whether the sordid story they infer is in the material or in their own dirty minds.

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Jalna Is a Sordid Bore

Jalna reads as if it were written by someone whose day job is writing Cliff Notes. If there ever was any life in these characters or sense in the plot, it’s not here now.

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Claire Ambler Is Seriously Funny

Booth Tarkington makes Claire both a typical adolescent and a district person. Readers can — and will — laugh at Claire’s self-absorption. But they will realize long before she does that it’s not funny. . . . An inability to see other people as people, “not just something . . . to use,” is the root of most human misery.

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Bad Girl suffers chronic depression

Dot meets Eddie Collins at a dance. The first time they have sex, Eddie says he’ll take off work the next day and marry her. Within weeks she learns she’s pregnant with a child neither she nor Eddie is ready to have.

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Greene Murder Case Decent Potboiler

The Green Murder Case presents Philo Vance one of his most perplexing mysteries. Two women are shot, one fatally, in a New York mansion where four adult children and one adopted daughter live with their invalid mother, according to the terms of the father’s will.
The police think it was a robbery gone wrong. A brother [...]

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Swan Song Great Novel, Poor Overture

I don’t recommend Swan Song to anyone who hasn’t read the other five novels in [The Forsyte Chronicles]. You won’t understand why characters act as they do unless you know what’s happened in earlier books.

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Wintersmoon never catches fire

Hugh Walpole’s Wintersmoon turns the romance novel on its head.
Selfishness masquerades as love throughout the novel, causing no end of problems, just as it does in real life.

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Slender Bridge Destroyed by Weighty Prose

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer Prize in 1928. The novel has since been ignored in favor of less literary but more entertaining reading.

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