A DEPUTY WAS KING. By G. B. Stern. (Chapman and
Hall. 7s. 6d. net.)—Miss G. B. Stern's clever new book falls into two unequal halves. The first is devoted to a lively description of the adventures in business and marriage of Toni Rakonitz. Half Jew, half Christian, and rebellious member of a vast family with branches and subdivisions in every European city, Toni is delightfully shrewd, with a certain clarity of purpose which preserves her from hardness. A success in business as a fashionable dressmaker, she longs to be a petted wife, as cherished as ineffectual. Married in haste to a typical modern Englishman, she deliberately apes the clinging creature she never could become.
Regrets for her dressmaking shop torment her : she finds herself drawn more closely to her huge family : and she is puzzled by a certain unwillingness on the part of her debonair husband to play the strong average male to her counterfeit feminine dependence. All this is most brilliantly given. There is not a word one could spare from all that concerns Toni herself, the family of highly individual merchants from which she springi, or her Hanover Square shop. The second half of the book unfortunately loses itself in the affairs of people less interesting than the heroine.
The matter is equally worthy, but Miss Stern overcrowds her canvas. And Toni herself is so adorable and complex that one a little resents being called from her affairs to attend to those of less perfectly drawn and much less lovable people.
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