BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue XXV, 20 December 1902, Page 1586

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

“THE MANOR FARM.” Those who take delight in Mrs. Francis Blundell’s eharming pictures of rustic life have a fresh pleasure betore them in this, her latest novel, which, after running as a serial in the London “Weekly Times,” now comes to us in book form. The Dorset she knows and describes so well is the scene of the story, which abounds in that delightful humour, arising out of the authoress’ clear perception of the true values of life, whence her best books get their distinctive flavour. Her people in “The Manor Farm” are drawn with the masterly touch that makes them live for us. They are fascinatingly simple and direct in their speech and ways, and so human. We enter with the keenest interest into their hopes and sorrows, the humorous complexities and “contrarinesses” of the situations in which they find themselves at various stages of the story. In the end our pleasure in finding matters settling themselves exactly as they should, is tinged with a faint regret that the settlement was not put off a little longer in order that we might not have to part so soon from the rustic group that has won our hearts. “LIFE, THE INTERPRETER.” This novel is very much more pretentious in its scope, and considerably less conspicuous in its merits, than the foregoing, but still it must

be frankly admitted that it is intereating, and shows thought and feeling of nn mean order. Muriel Dallertoa, the heroine, is a young lady of wealth, birth and great personal attractions, who lives in the slums of London, devoting herself, with lasting enthusiasm, to the work of brightening the lives and bettering the characters of the unfortunates whose homes are there. The story of Muriel’s work and her devotion to it, of her love affairs, which run no more smoothly than the average love affairs in novels, is told with vivacity and earnestness. There are many minor characters in the book, ar.ft the authoress manages to interest us in most of them as well as in the heroine and the man who eventually wins her. “LITTLE MOTHER MEG." Ethel Turner (Mrs. Carlewis) has such popularity throughout Australasia among children, and even among a large class of the younger adults, that perhaps one can give no higher praise to her latest story than to say that, in spirit and form, it very much resembles those others preceding it, which have won for her such a big, appreciative public. The family at Misrule, aged by a few years, again make the dramatis personae, with some additions from Inside and outside, and they and their surroundings have the distinctively Australian flavour which makes the majority of Mrs. Carlewis’ readers feel so much at home in the pages of her books. “Little Mother Meg,” furnishing bright, wholesome, attractive reading, and brilliantly bound in scarlet and gold, with dainty illustrations, should be in great demand as a Christmas gift-book.