HILTON HEAD

This may be a Discoverers' Selection, but I plead guilty to having found it excessively burdensome. Historical novels, these days, must be something more than sound background, or new phases of the American picture. Here is a story of the establishment of the English colonies in the Carolinas, -- especially Charles Town and points South. The central figure is a 17th century surgeon, one Henry Woodward, seeking a fortune in the New World, and thrust by chance into the very heart of the Carolina settlement, with all its ramifications of Spanish and Indian neighbors. The characters seemed wooden, the story long spun out and unoriginal, the style and manner oddly dated, suggesting a feeble echo of Marryat.