_Heritage_ (COLLINS) gives me much the same impression that one obtains from the spectacle of a man wire-walking in a sack or painting pictures with his toes--attempting, in short, any task under conditions of the greatest possible handicap. That certainly is what Miss V. SACKVILLE-WEST has been at pains to impose upon herself. With a straightforward, simple and interesting tale and some considerable gifts for reproducing character, she has deliberately sacrificed these advantages by telling her story in the most roundabout and awkward manner imaginable. The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock, the victims of this inconvenient blend being _Ruth_ and the young cousin whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. _Ruth_, as I say, was attracted to _Westmacott_ with only part of her being; the better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in making soft eyes at two other men, one of whom, _Malory_, is supposed to relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous outsider who puts them down. This _vivâ-voci_ recital is subsequently rounded off by _Malory_, in what is surely the least credible of all the unlikely letters in fiction, nearly a hundred printed pages of it. So you see the obstacles that Miss SACKSVILLE-WEST has placed in her own and her reader's path. That, despite them all, the interest, and passion of this first novel do get home is an encouraging omen for her success when she has learnt a greater simplicity of attack.
_Wings of the Morning_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) might have been a most recommendable book, for it is in essentials a pleasant story of a great artist who for the crime of his hot-headed youth suffered imprisonment in the United States, and, having "covered his tracks," came home, fell in love with his delightful sister's delightful step-daughter and, after much suffering for them both, told his history and won his lady. But unfortunately the inessentials--and among these I have the temerity to include the great European War, or, at any rate, very much that is here told of it--are so harrowing that they do not accord with the pleasant story to which they are tacked on. I would not ask to be spared the knowledge of anything faced by other people while I sat immune at home, but there are many incidents which cannot with decency or dignity be served up in fiction to add a thrill to the enjoyment of an hour's light reading. Miss JOAN SUTHERLAND would have done well to have left detail to more serious exponents, and to have discarded entirely one scene of bestial cruelty which has no real bearing on her tale. Never in a novel--and seldom in historical accounts of fighting--have I been asked to wallow in so much gore. It is all the more regrettable because when Miss SUTHERLAND uses her imagination on less horrible subjects she is much more successful.