THE MOONFLOWER VINE

This apparently autobiographical chronicle of a Missouri country family is a Literary Guild selection for January. Readers who seek a strong story line will look in vain for this merely records, and unfolds, the domestic trivialities as well as crises in a family of four daughters. Their father, Matthew, is a schoolteacher who has had to struggle to educate himself, while his wife- Callie- is virtually illiterate. If they sometimes drift apart, if Matthew finds himself enamored with a young student, it is partly because Callie cannot share in the public aspect of his life. The loves of their daughters brings them nothing but pain. Their oldest girl elopes with a hired man; impulsive and independent Matty marries an aviator whom the family deplores; and after Matty is killed in a plane crash which he survives, the now chastened and sobered husband marries another of the girls.... It's an unpretentious and old-fashioned sort of book despite the lack of plot, and the writing is unremarkable; yet the characterization is effective and the dialogue has a striking and engaging authenticity. A woman's market, conservative in character, seems likeliest.