Word: pleasant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Margery Sharp has a sharp eye. But it takes more than that to be a really good writer. In her slight, pleasant novels (The Nutmeg Tree, Cluny Brown) she has neatly observed the small, telling details of social manners that weightier novelists often pass by. Her special gift is sketching, snippily but without too much malice, the idiosyncratic types that seem still to populate the English countryside as in the days of Jane Austen. (This gift has paid off well; three of her novels have been chosen as monthly selections by the Book-of-the-Month Club...
...minor but respectable talents are not as successful in The Foolish Gentlewoman as in its predecessors. The novel begins promisingly enough. At Chipping Lodge on Chipping Hill, a pleasant, grassy spot eight miles from London, lives "sentimental, affectionate, uncritical Mrs. Brocken," together with mementos of her younger years and miscellaneous members of her family. Mrs. Brocken "had adored her husband and was very fond of her French peppermill. An old watering-can was dear to her because she remembered seeing the gardener use it on her mother's rose-beds, and a new alarm-clock, because...
...eight-year-old boy whom Father J. Franklin Ewing, SJ. has posthumously named (60,000 years after death) Egbert. Most of the little cave boy's bones are still imbedded in a block of stone, but the skull is exposed. It has, thinks Father Ewing, "a very pleasant smile...
...Joseph J.. Koenig was a successful manufacturer of gift-shop novelties, with a pleasant middle age ahead of him. At that point, instead of taking up golf or Sunday painting, he decided that he might enjoy going to college-he never...
...keep movin' along. Nor has it very much more of musicomedy's factitious lure than of the old Hudson River Valley's drowsy charm; only here & there is a lyric sprightly, or the dancing gay. As Ichabod, angular Gil Lamb is likable and pleasant, but by no means a tide-turner. Best thing about Sleepy Hollow is the singing, which does a lot for the next best thing-the songs...