Down Our Street. By J. E. Buckrose. (Mills and Boon.
6s.)— It is an achievement for any writer to have added one to those figures in the world of fiction which stand for types. Mr. Buckrose has accomplished this feat in the portrait of Mrs. Bean, whose attractions are so great that if many people of her sort live in the suburbs of provincial towns, they must be far more charming places of abode than is generally supposed. Mrs. Bean is hasty, impulsive and to a certain extent meddlesome. She has an ardent desire to shine in the world of fashion, and her ideas of dress are quite remarkably brilliant. But she is the keynote of the chord which draws the people living in "our street" into an entity, and before the end of the book they have all found out how impossible life would be without her. It must not be thought, however, that she is the only well-drawn figure in Mr. Buokrose's gallery. All those who are mentioned as dwellers in "our street" live before the eyes of the reader, and, though many of them are quite intolerable, the author contrives to make us sympathise to a certain extent with them all. The book is extraordinarily pleasant reading, and the reviewer, jaded with the flood of commonplace contemporary fiction, feels that a debt of gratitude is owing to Mr_ Buckrose for making one piece of work a delightful event.
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