Lottie and Lisa. By Erich Kastner. (Cape. 7s. 6d.)
ERICH KASTNER, author of Emil and the Detectives (now nineteen years old), has written another excellent, and sometimes ironic, children's story. It has been admirably translated from the German by Cyrus Brooks,and its theme is so ingenious that it would readable even without the graces of telling that Herr Kastner giv it. Two little girls with different names meet at a holiday-home, and discover first that they are exactly alike, second that they were born on the same day in the same town, and third that one has onlY a father and the ,other only a mother. The conclusipn is obvious, and in a desire to reunite their parents they change places at the end of the holiday; having coached one another on the details of each unknown existence. Their progress with the separate parents in Vienna and Munich leads' to a family reunion by way of Lottiel illness. There are a few charming digressions—including a defeac of the introducttOn of divorce into a children's book and a verY Germanic dream ipterlude—and the foreign atmosphere, most tact- fully managed, gives additional pungency. The characters are lightly sketched but lively, and include pedagogues, an artist, doctor and an unpleasant "fashionable young lady" who ,tries M marry " Daddy.%Aitogether it is a book to be read at a sitting by about nine-year-olds onwards and probably also by adults.
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