BRIEFER MENTION
Annette and Bennett, by Gilbert Cannan (12 mo, 315 pages; Seltzer: $2) is the third of a series dealing with the Lawries and the Folyats. One is asked to listen to the same speeches from James Lawrie as he voiced in the earlier volumes, as he glories in his failure and clings doggedly to being treated as a leper in his own house. One can love Annette, and for her sake put up with the Lawries, but they are bitter pills. And one can hope that conditions in English towns will improve, and that Annette's children, when it is their turn to have a novel written about them, will display an inheritance of traits from their mother's rather than from their father's side.
The Desert Horizon, by E. L. Grant Watson (12 mo, 302 pages; Knopf: $2.50) is a simply-told tale of the Australian desert and of a boy who prefers his sandy miles to any other place on earth. He is, so Mr Watson tells us, "the willing slave of life and the desert . . . hardly as yet aware of his captivity." There is in this book, as in the author's earlier works, a fitting of human life into an accepted pattern. Mr Watson is a trained ethnologist, and has satisfied himself that men must make as simple an adjustment to environment and to other men as animals make to their jungles and their mates. His people are, with few exceptions, elemental, animal-fibred, with their unhumorous minds focused on their sheep herding or their pursuit of a mate to share their incessant struggle to wring a living out of difficult mediums. One misses something, however, in so direct and unsubtle an account of life.
The Lone Winter, by Anne Bosworth Greene (12 mo, 379 pages; Century: $2.25). All that is required of any reader of this thoroughly delightful book, is a liking for open country and animals. The story is of a winter spent on a Vermont mountain farm by a woman who is an artist, a writer, and an expert in the raising of Shetland ponies. She is a most truthful person, not rhapsodizing to the extent of concealing her occasional fits of depression over remoteness and lack of human society, nor her delight in the prospects of a visit from her boarding-school daughter, or from her curious, kindly friends in the village below.
Stories, Dreams, and Allegories, by Olive Schreiner (12mo, 153 pages; Stokes: $1.75) may add nothing to the reputation of their author, yet they contain much work in her happiest vein. They are characterized by the same butterfly beauty, the same imagination and simplicity as mark her previously published books; they range from the verge of realism to the rainbow clouds of fantasy; at times they reveal a deep but unaffected emotion, at times they are beautifully symbolical, and occasionally they are warm and vivid in their criticism of life.
