Books: Happy Endings

THE HUNTER’S MOON—Ernest Poole—Macmillan ($2.00). Author Poole for once has got away from the unpleasantnesses of living in the crowded city called great, but this story too is set in Manhattan. It is the story of an unhappy family from the standpoint of the little boy who lives in it, sees his mother and his father driven apart by a hard penny-scrimping grandmother, and only partly understands. But it has an entirely happy ending, for it sees through the eyes of the boy promise of all good things when the song-singing lover of life who is his grandfather comes to take him and his mother away. Mr. Poole has hit upon the one method of writing a completely realistic story with an unqualified happy ending.

THREE FARMS—Cynthia Stockley—Putnam’s ($1.50). Farming in Rhodesia—an English master ruling in solitude over a horde of native “boys” with others of his kind living some miles away for his only neighbors. To such a farm-master, who is her husband, comes an Englishwoman to find that he no longer cares much for her. Slowly the tentacles of intrigue wind about them and their neighbors. She wins back her husband’s love, only to learn that one of her neighbors with a sensual wife has been made a cuckold, and that her husband was the maker. Then follows the neighbor’s revenge—and her own grief, wondering whose child she is to bear. It all moves with despatch to a well-planned happy ending—but unmistakably planned.