A MATTER OF CHOOSING

Although the scene is the west, rather than the midwest, there are moments- and characters- which suggest a continuity with the earlier Childsplay. Again a nameless (this time older) girl views and reviews her past, some forty years later in a series of snapshots as fresh as the day they were taken; retrospect has not superimposed image. At her father's death, she comes to stay with her grandmother, ""a sort of moral countinghouse, the place and place and condition of conscience""; a softer influence will her Aunt Augusta, a freer one too since Augusta is the archangel who flouted the Sacred Family Law, smoked, was divorced, and remarried. There will also be the pain of her unexpected early death. Through this exposure to sorrow, and school, and later Standford and her expulsion, and finally working and moving alone- to the East, a girl's emotional emancipation is achieved. None of this is perhaps very important, but all of it is attractive, it is not only true to life but probably close to personal experience.