29 MARCH 1884, Page 24

Not Like Other Girls. By Rosa Nouchette Carey. 3 vols.

(Bentley and Son.)—Miss Carey's subject would have made a pretty little novelette, but it is unequal to the serious demands made upon it by the requirements of a three-volume novel. The story may be told in a very few words. Three sisters, reduced to poverty with their widowed mother, recognise, with a sagacity that does them credit, that they are not fit for the employment of teaching in which reduced gentlewomen commonly take refuge, and boldly under- take what they really are fit for,—dressmaking. Their experiences furnish some interesting reading. But then, to make up the required thousand pages, they have to be eked-ont with something else, and this something is, we are bound to tell Miss Carey, distinctly tedious. The Drummond family do not interest us at all. Of course, the dressmaking business is not carried out to the bitter end. A wealthy cousin from Australia appears on the scene; two of the girls who are "not like other girls" marry, and the third, with her mother, re- mains in a state of genteel dependence upon the cousin. Miss Carey writes, as usual, with liveliness ; but this story is far from being up to the mark of "Mary St. John," the last of her tales which we remember to have read.