"KITTY."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19833, 31 December 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

"KITTY."

WARWICK DEEPING'S .LATEST. What is the quality that makes bestsellers of books good, bad or indifferent? Surely it is, in the true sense of tile word, their vulgarity, their appeal to that common but indispensable organ, the heart. Most human beings, beneath the veneer of polished cynicism, are sentimentalists—indeed, Mr. Dale Collins has made this belief the keynote of his latest book. Warwick Deeping then, like A. S. M. Hutchinson, like the late Florence Barclay, like the living Miss Ethel Dell, is passionately sincere, and his sincerity, like theirs, unlocks the fount of common human emotion. "Kitty" (Cassell) is sure of a success eaual to thst of Sorrell and Son. Ihe story is of the simplest. Alex St. George, only son of a wealthy mother, is ordered to "the front after having been kept through his mother's influence on homo service most of the war. He is desperately afraid and desperately ashamed of his "fear, and after trying to drown his terrors in the usual way. he wanders out and by chance enters the shop of Mrs, Greenwood, tobacconist, who possesses, in addition to a lucrative business, two pretty daughters, Corah and Kitty. He and Kitty fall in love, and are married before he goes out. Mrs. St. George, coldly furious, refuses to recognise such a mesalliance, and when Alex is sent back from the front, helpless and paralysed, she kidnaps him from the hospital. Then begins the great struggle between mother and daughter-in-law for the possession of Alex. Kitty, sturdy, warm-hearted and practical, is more than a match for the inhuman mother-in-law. She fights in a good cause. The struggle is not so much to assert her own rights as to save her husband's manhood. Out of these familiar ingredients Mr. Warwick Deeping has concocted a very satisfying dish, as rich, as solid and as English as a Christmas pudding, and Kitty herself, little and brave and gay, is the 'human counterpart of the robin in the snow.