Starlight Through the Roof. By Kevin Kennedy. (Downey and Co.)—This
is a lively Munster story, full of conspiracy, misery, abduction, and fighting, with a little animal spistits thrown in. It also, of course, contains some politics more or less of the agrarian type; it would hardly, indeed, be an Irish story if it did not contain something of the kind. Perhaps the best character in the book is Dinny Dooley, a really admirable specimen of the faithful Irish peasant, who is as loyally attached as any dog could be to a young man " socially " above him,—in this case a rather heavy walking gentleman named Gerald O'Hara. Dinny is eqiially ready for a joke and for the breaking open of a prison to set free an incarcerated friend. If Gerald O'Hara is rather too heavy a specimen of the gentleman, Dalton Harvey is also a not quite unsatisfactory example of the villainous " agent," who is by no means above the using of his legal powers for the fur- . therance of his own generally vindictive private purposes. For one thing, he drinks far too hard ; for another, he is a bungler. Nothing could be clumsier than his attempt to carry off Gerald O'Hara's wife. The plot, too, is not very coherent. Such things, however, are quite forgotten, when one finds oneself in the midst of harem-scarum Irish adventure, pathos, and kindliness. It may at least be claimed for Starlight Through the Roof that it smacks of the soil that it deals with.
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