THE BRIGHT PROMISE

This bids fair to be more than ""a bright promise"", what with its spectacular send-off as a quarter-million (?) dollar picture purchase, serialization in Good House-keeping, and selection as September Literary Guild. Sherman has two light novels (To Mary, With Love and The Unready Heart) to his credit, and this- while more sizeable is scarcely more substantial. It is still summer weight fiction- at its most successful, and there's nothing much more rare at the moment. Too bad it could not have been published six weeks earlier to get the full run of vacation reading. Sherman has a sure sense of dialogue, of the contemporary scene and situation, and he does it decoratively. Here is the story of the marriage of Amy and Lyle Ellery over a period of twelve years,- Lyle who has an easy brilliance and was just as easily licked; Amy whose love for him took a lot of quiet courage. They were married in depression years; then Lyle gets his chance and makes a rocket rise to success as brain-father and editor of a picture magazine. He loses his job because of an affair with his publisher's wife, while Amy is having their only child, Johnny. The next years are hard ones as Lyle, defeated, disgruntled, sinks to a WPA job, and then returns to Iowa with Amy to edit her father's small town sheet, and eventually finds himself again, in the dignity and satisfaction of working his way back to prominence. With the war, Lyle goes overseas, and Amy has her bitterest years as Johnny is striken with polio and mother and child- with the image and inspiration of Roosevelt before them- regain their courage.... A very smooth, slick- paper job, with the inspirational quality that is passport to sales and rentals.