A VERY MIXED LOT

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 115, 17 May 1930, Page 21

A VERY MIXED LOT

In "Supremacy," by H. D. Slater (London: Cassell), the author has taken for his setting England in 1075. Paul Eooksby had led a rather quiet and monotonous life until he met Lord Shafiesbury. Almost simultaneously he meets a young and penniless orphan who is flying in fear from an impossible cousin. Paul, who is torn between love and ambition, finds' that his career is being moulded without his knowledge. Compelling streams sweep him first one way, then another, until at last bo finds the one and only stream of _ success. It is a compelling story, written in the author's best vein. The Modern Girl in Fiction. "To-day's Daughter," by • Berta Buck ,(London: Hodder and Stoughton), is the novelist's own conception of the modern girl. It may not be pleasing to some parents, but it certainly provides plenty of interesting reading. Pet Elliott is the heroine of the story. She is the daughter of "the world's most. ■ successful fiction writer," who, disapproving of tke girl's choice of a mate, demands that she become independent of family for a year, in the hope that association with working girls will rid her of romance. Her adventures make amusing reading. How the heroine does all she sets out to do is told in the best "Kuek" style, with its pictures of cocktail parties at Chelsea and midnight dances on the Biviera. An Ethical Story. The injustice of the English: marriage and legitimacy laws is the basis of Emineline Morrison's latest , novel, "The Wings of a Butterfly" (London: Hutchinson and Co.). The' point .is dealt with in a'condemning and downright manner, but the plot is slightly worn through hard usage. The story is interesting, and •is sympathetically told. ; Conventional Romance. "The Genius of Gerald," by. E. Ever-ett-Green (London: Stanley Paul), is frankly a love novel. Gerald Underwood, eldest son of an old English family, meets Dacre Starr, an American girl travelling in Switzerland. He takes her home with him to act as general manager for the neglected Underwood, estates. Complications develop, as they would when eight young people, all intending to marry, but undecided of choice, are. collected together. But Zoe, Gerald's young sister, gives them all a "line," and the tale achieves the conventional happy ending. . - Übiquitous "Inlaws." "The Mad Shepherdess",is a rather simple story of English country life, by Hugh Brooke (Longmans: London), in which a harassed and unmarried young man is saddled with'a. tribe ..of tiresome relations. That he descends at times to the- language of increasingly common usage'can be excused under the circumstances, but the .reader wonders long.before the end of the story why he does not insist on a compulsory, evacuation. There are some queer characters, possible if -improbable, and some rather good pen-pictures of Southern England. . This is portrayed well by the indiscretions of one of his family at the local subscription dance and its effect on the leaders of local society: The introduction of a manufacture of a talking-film gives an ultra-modern touch.