RAIN BEFORE SEVEN

I liked it -- immensely. The pattern is not a new one -- a woman disappointed in love and cheated of her birthright, seeks to build herself a new life away from the city; but Miss Bailey's handling of her plot finds new paths, her characters are not stock characters, all white, all black; her situations are adroit and original; and she makes her shifting viewpoint dependent on character and incident and background, and not machine-made. Moreover, the Connecticut town with its hidebound line of demarcation between natives and outsiders, is delightfully handled, and the Town Meeting with which the story closes is the perfect ending for the story, drawing the threads into a pattern that goes on. Sometimes one feels that the author takes a roundabout way to say her say -- but she manages to make her bypaths interesting. A woman's book.