Mariella of Out-West. By Ella Higginson. (Macmillan & Co. 6s.)
—This is a striking story. The farmers of the Western States with whom it deals are men of rough lives and strong passions. Mariella, the heroine, is a delicate, clever, and naturally refined girl out of place among them, but possibly for that very reason intensely attractive to them. When the book begins she is a child, and her mother, a coarse-fibred, woman who repels the reader at first, fills the chief place in the picture. The best thing in the book is the gradual unfolding of this woman's character till at last the reader not only pities but likes her. Mariella is wooed by a man of her own class and by an American gentleman of European polish. All our sympathies are with the farmer, yet we are made to desire his unhappiness for the sake of Mariella, who can never, we feel, fulfil her natural destiny " Out-West." The denouement is admirably brought about. The book is interesting from beginning to end.
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