THE WISE CHILDREN

An American (as against the Indian setting of Indige, The Word is a novel concentrates an inbred family drama within a few weeks which will bring revelation to an old resentment, intimates much and invites the reader's curiosity, and achieves fairly complicated crisscross of emotional liens, and loyalties. If it is not the stuff of literature, it has all the assets of well-bred entertainment. Delia, at 50, is an attractive, composed and self-effacing woman who has spent the years since her husband's death in protecting her daughter Veronica's image of her unworthy father, and in salvaging her twin sister- Fran-from her untidy, unhappy life of drinking and debt. Veronica, repudiating and hating her mother, has written out most of it in a first novel which has been privately guarded until its acceptance for publication by Donald Walling- ford- who falls in love with Delia and resents her victimization by Veronica- and by Fran. The novel, however, which will destroy Delia in the eyes of her son, finally forces Fran to reveal the well-guarded past, of her affair with Charles and Delia's adoption of the child of that affair- Veronica, and Delia can face the future with Veronica's respect restored and Wallingford's love well-earned..... Mrs. Weston keeps a knowing command of her characters and situations; her writing is intelligent and civilized- and her handling of Fran, in some sudden sequences in bars and shabby hotels, is particularly effective. A woman's audience should be available and susceptible.