EXPERIMENT: Four Short Novels

Two of the long-short stories are excellent; the other two scarcely justify being called ""short novels"" as they are psychological studies, with slim plot as basis for character delineation, rather than stories per se. With One Coin for Fee, the first story, in brief compass sketches the pattern of two lives, school girls together, whose fate took them down divergent paths and brought them back to meet again at the time of the New England hurricane. Snow in Summer is the record of a mid-western housewife's challenge to domesticity, and of how she found herself in a new venture, outside the plan laid down by her husband and children. Popular magazine sort of stuff, in the main, but excellent of its kind. Helen Hull cuts below the surface.