Vacheli. Hutchinson. 7s. 6d. net. "Tue Uxcrowy-Urs." By "Rita."
Putnam. 6d. net.
"Nor rv Our Srans.". By Michael Maurice, 7s. 6d. net.
The South Seas, "good old England," a "nice" girl in "Society and quasi scientific fortune telling: a good many novels have already been written on all these four lines. Three of the authors have indeed already provided a good many of them, and perhaps it is because-he is a new comer that Mr. Michael Maurice seems to be the most ingenious of the four. He at any rate has done nothing previously to make us know from the first few pages exactly what to except. It is certainly one advantage he has over the others.
"Not in Our Stars" is quite a clever first novel. There is not much more in it than that, perhaps, but that is something. It is about aman who can read the future. Suddenly he has a vision of what is coming to him in the year ahead. This vision is told to us backwards, as he saw it, as part of the story itself. At the end we are left with the philosophical problem: the future being fixed from what we are at present, can he avoid the tragedy ahead of him or not? If it is fixed, he obviously cannot. On the other hand, he, having the. experience gained by this insight into the future, is obviously a. different person from what he would have been without it, and therefore the' factors in the situation are no longer the same. It is a good idea for a story, and ingeniously worked out. The characterization is ordinary enough, and the writing is workmanlike
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.