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FAMILY TREE by Florence Maple

FAMILY TREE

By

Pub Date: May 21st, 1945
Publisher: Knopf

Cleanout, unsweetened probing and styling for the family portrait of the Calete of Kakenka, presumably a midwest small town in a farming community, seen through the eyes of Judelle, recently orphaned, who comes there to look up her relatives and stays on to affect several of their lives. Victims of a grandfather's will which had insisted on a college education, Marion had returned home to marry, and found herself dissatisfied with the role of housewife; Steve had been tied down by his mother, who hated him; Nick bummed around in cheap bars with cheap girls; and Blythe, who had wasted to farm, had become a dentist instead, and drank his escape from a wife. Judelle's fourth and honesty gives impetus to all, as Nick enlists, Steve breaks from his mother and goes west, and Blythe, ousting the wife who was ruining their child, plans for a new life with Judelle. Muted discord and dissatisfaction, publicly poisoning privately -- in an honest, holding rendition. A first novel.