YOUTH

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23747, 19 September 1942, Page 7

YOUTH

NEW NOVELS

Bird of the Wilderness. By Vincent Sheean. Macmillan. 314 pp. Troubled by the conflict between his love for his mother and his antagonism to her German relations and background, drifting into the bewildered exaltation and pain of first love, Bill Owen in his last high school year—the year 1917, when Wilson still held the United States from war—is a study of youth upon which Mr Sheean has spent memory and imagination with wise care. This is exhibited in the success with which he relates the background of a small Illinois town to the shaping of Bill's problems and their resolution: a background in which the gossip of the drug-store moralists has one sort of influence and the performance—beautifully described—of Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” another. In tracing the relations between Bill and his young teacher Saki to their inevitable break, however, Mr Sheean allows a melodramatic irrelevance to tangle an otherwise smooth design.

ROMANCE From the New World. By Robert Bilbie. Hodder and Stoughton. 256 pp. (8/6 net.)

Mr Bilbie’s story, which swings easily between piratical adventure on the high seas and the gallantries and disasters of Monmouth’s rebellion, carries the reader to a century and to scenes romantically remote and among heroes and villains as attractive.