Kirkus Reviews QR Code
GIRL IN MAY by Bruce Marshall

GIRL IN MAY

By

Pub Date: April 30th, 1956
Publisher: Roughton, Mifflin

St. Andrews by the northern sea"" -- this is the setting for Bruce Marshall's gentle satire on the weaknesses of the flesh, and the poverty of the spirit. His barbs- kindly ones- are directed almost alike against the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and the Roman Catholics -- and the verbal battles waged over the golf course and the cricket green. Against this running battle of wits is told a winsome love story, in which a schoolboy studying with the ministry of the Episcopal Church in view, and the schoolgirl daughter of the local Canon, whose High Church Anglicanism comes perilously close to being the ""bridge"" he proclaims it to be. Soutar was naive and ardent in his pursuit, of Bumpie, but her father reached a point of no return when their last misdemeanor tried his patience too far. A kindly soul, he yielded again and again...And thirty years later, Bishop Soutar, dignitary of the Church of Rome, comes back to St. Andrews -- and to his memories of a girl he had lost. A tour de force, this slight tale -- and the colloquialism and Scotticisms trip the unwary reader.