PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 55, 6 March 1937, Page 27

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Chief Librarian of the Wellington Public Libraries has chosen "Together and Apart," by Margaret Kennedy, as the book of the week, and has furnished the following review:— Miss Kennedy's story, ''Together and Apart," is another instance of her delightful power of telling about real and pleasant people; so that the reader simply adds- them to the number- of his acquaintances as though they were living people to whom he had been introduced. There is-perhaps not very much depth in Miss Kennedy's situations: her taste and talent are more adapted to the surface of life, but there is always a grain of truth and sense underlying what she says. The present book is definitely a comedy one, and it tells of the divorce of two people who have been married for a little time, then of their remarriages, quickly undertaken but repented of at leisure. A fault in the book is perhaps that the characters, like the situations, are not as perfect nor as fully rounded as those in her earlier books, but the temptation in novel. writing today is definitely to make the characters types and, if they are pleasant types, so much the better. Alec and Betsy are quite well off and pleasant people, but their married life ends suddenly when they quarrel. Family influences are not much help; the quarrel is really the result of a situation unconsciously brought about 'by Alec's mother, £ person who is preoccupied With being psychic, and later on the friends of the formerly happy couple make quite certain that there is no chance of a reconciliation. Betsy- tries .to persuade herself, to marry a saintly.but physically unattractive peer1, while Alec consoles himself with Joy, the. young lady help, whom he takes with him from his own establishment, almost as an .afterthought. Joy is very much in love with Alec, but a complete little fool, and Alec finds her thoroughly boring. Her efforts to retain his affection are rather tragic, because so true to' life.

It is a pity that Miss Kennedy has never been to a boys' school, because', if she had, her delineation of the various sides of a boy's life might have been a little more accurate. ' The son of the marriage, Ken, is presented as a schoolboy in the' clutches of a band of vicious schoolmates. Mr. Horace Annesley Vachell lias already shown that the light and shade of school life can be dealt with by direct statement rather than by implication, and it is •very seldom that a boy's. life is completely blighted by his excursions- with a packet of woodbines to behind the haystack. It is really with grown-up people that Miss Kennedy is most successful, and here her freshness of touch is most often ielt.

RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS

Other titles selected from recent accession lists Vare as follows:—General: "Marie Tempest," by H. Bolitho; "New Governments in- Europe," edited by R. L. Buell; "A Last Medley of Memories," by Sir D. H. Blair. Fiction: "Level Crossing," py P. Bottoms; "The Rainbow Trail," by ,W. Q. Reid; "The Croquet Player," by H. G. Wells.