You'll be liable to shy off at that title and say: "No more 'glad' books for me! I'm growing up!" But you'll be making a big mistake if you do. "The Blue Castle" is grown-up, too. And aside from being poignantly human, it is almost poetically beautiful in parts. "Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jeweled, barbaric hills, and icy-grey twilights, broken by snowsqualls. Doesn't that have twice the color, twice the beauty and rhythm that five sixths of the "verse libre" printed today attains? And the story is fascinating. It's about Valancy Stirling, who for the twenty-nine years of her life has been tied down by fear. Fear of criticism, fear of her mother, fear of her whole "tribe." And when she finds that she has only a year to live she breaks away; defies them all. She goes to the home of Roaring Abel, an old reprobate, and takes care of his daughter, a poor little waif with an illegitimate child. And she proposes marriage to Barney Snaith, a man about whom nothing is known but much is said. Then life starts for Valancy, and for the reader too; mystery, love, humor and pathos. And when you finish it, it leaves you with all the most delightful sensations - the thrill of first love; the splendor of mountains and trees; the feeling that God is very close when the sky is so blue.
