N.Z. Setting

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29366, 19 November 1960, Page 3

N.Z. Setting

Tangahano. By Frances Keinzly Davies. 255 pp.

Frances Keinzly is a writer whose sympathetic interest in human nature enables her to enter into the problems of people living in difficult conditions. In “Tangahano,” she writes of the predicament in which the Pilgrim family find themselves in an unpleasant shanty town by the Waikato river. Judd Pilgrim is an electrician, who is anxious to get on, so he takes his wife and two children to Tangohano, where he is promised a good job. But the experience is disastrous. Living conditions are primitive, and some unpleasant personal problems destroy the happiness of the marriage. Kathie Pilgrim and Judd leave Tangahano separately, jlhe place had taken almost everything from them; but fortunately there was enough left to reunite them in the more genial atmosphere of Auckland. Miss Keinzly tells a painful Story in a rough, uncompromising way. Her real understanding of the situation might have been conveyed more poignantly if she had written with greater restraint