The Bent Twig. By Dorothy Canfield. (Constable and Co.
We cannot praise too highly the careful and ingenious energy which /Ilse Canfield brings to her writing. This novel is exceedingly long, yet every paragraph is honestly dealt with, every chapter nicely balanced ; and some of the characters are admirably drawn, especially Professor and Mrs. Marshall, who are worth a great deal more, both intellectually and emotionally, than their children. But there are faults in ti's story. There is no clear thread in it to guide us, and, unless wa remind ourselves incessantly that it is the story of the development of one Sylvia Marshall, we lose ourselves and it in a tangle of unimportant little episodes. And Sylvia herself is not interesting enough, is not, indeed, half so interesting as her sister Judith : she is an unaggressive and quite ordinary girl who in sexual matters is foolish without being altogether ignorant ; and we scarcely care enough about her adolescence to wish to study it through four hundred and seventy closely printed pages.
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