Miss Edna Ferber is less well known to English readers
than she deserves to be. Her new novel, So Big, while not .equalling in charm her previous book on the earliest years of Chicago, yet gives a wonderful picture of the truck farmer thirty years ago in the environs of the same city. It is really (Continued on next page.)
a mistake to call the book So Big, which is the nickname of Dirk De Jong, for much the most prominent figure is that of his mother, Selina, and during three-quarters of the book Dirk is a child. He is not, either, the usual prominent child of fiction, but merely a background to his mother's activities. The novel is really concerned with the life-story of Selina Peake, who, beginning her career as a school-teacher in the Dutch School at High Prairie, subsequently marries Pergus De Jong, a vegetable farmer, and the picture of her struggles first with her sluggish husband, and then as a widow, forms the main theme of the volume. Through all her hard work Selina does not lose her ideals and, not losing them, keeps her ethical outlook undimmed. If the story can be said to have anything so old-fashioned as a moral, it is provided by the misery of Selina's son, the successful business man, Dirk, who, " falling in love with an artist, finds that he has bartered his own soul for success with stocks and shares. It must be confessed, however,. that Miss Ferber's psychology is not so interesting as her objective accounts of vegetable gardening. The best scene in the book is that in which Selina, in spite of the implicit Salle law of " the Haymarket," insists on taking her own vegetables to the Chicago market. The buyers entirely refuse to purchase from a woman. She then takes her waggon to private houses, only to find that in order to sell in small quaatities she requires a pedlar's licence. The undaunted Selina is indeed a domestically heroic figure, and readers who are unacquainted with the quality of Miss Ferber's work should lose no time in procuring this novel.
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