Books: No Second Spring

NEVER DIES THE DREAM (309 pp.)—Margaret London—Doubleday ($2.75).

In her bestseller, Anna and the King of Siam (TIME, July 10, 1944), Margaret Landon let her bucket down into a deep well of Siamese history and personal experience (she was ten years a missionary in Siam) and drew it up full of a sparkling mixture of Eastern fact & fable. Her new book, Never Dies the Dream, is another bucketful drawn from the same source, but though the mixture is as before, most of the first, fine sparkle has fizzed away.

Never Dies is a sad and solemn novel about India Severn, a spinster...