A NEW ZEALAND NOVEL.

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 17

A NEW ZEALAND NOVEL.

."April Sowing." By Rosemary R«es. London: Herbert Jenkins.

Miss Rosemary Bees, a New Zealander, was in her native land a few years ago with a company of players of her own. She is well known to the London stage, and is an actress of many excellent parts. Now she is introduced as a novelist. Her book, appropriately enough, is about New Zealand, but the two chief personages are English. Mrs. Brandon is discovered just- arrived at a faraway back bush hotel in answer tn an advertisement for a cook. There is something very strange about her arrival in such a capacity, for she is obviously a woman of gentle birth j yet she came out in an immigrant ship, and as a domestic servant. She immediately attracts the notice of Jim Carlyon, a besotted remittance man who hangs about the hotel and is induced by the landlady to go on drinking day after day, he jußt handing over his remittance as it arrives, and she taking out of it what he owes and debiting him with what he subsequently spends. On the ninth page, so swiftly does the writer get into action, Jim is seen imprinting a kiss on Mrs. Brandon's lips—for she is very beautiful. "It was a kiss in which hatred and the desire for mastery mingled. ' The new cook, very properly struck him with a plate, the shivers Qf which cut his wrist rather badly He deserved what he got, but the reader knows very well that in time these rather cave man embraces will be reciprocated, no matter how roughly the courue of true love^ thereafter may run.' How this comes about, ,and who Mrs. Brandon the cook m a country pub, happens to be is for the reader to discover. The ITrt r m- m|? orable M«° Pencil in parts of Miss Rees's story is obvious. There is one particularly unpleasant bur; gestion that could well have been left rt£ Ut ""P3l™? U* realism that the writer seems most anxious to display .As a description of country life in New Zealand it is more accurate than ?w a°- IV\ ? ■",? novel °f the kind that aims before all to get into the ranks of the best sellers. It might do that y et \ ' . ■•