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THREE ROUSING CHEERS FOR THE ROLLO BOYS !!!—Corey Ford—Doran ($2). The author of the wholesome, popular "Rover Boys" series may feel quite hurt at what Mr. Ford has gone and done. Mr. Ford's book is about three boys surnamed Rollo, not Rover, but some people are going to think he meant a parody on the Rovers just the same. These Rollos are not quite the well-behaved, sensible American boys the Rovers were, nor are their first names quite identical—brown-eyed, curly-haired, fun-loving Tom; sturdy Dick of 18 summers; and tall, serious Harry.— But they do all the kinds of things the Rovers did, only all in one book instead of a whole series. They win boat races, dig gold mines, fool cannibals, have picnics, etc. If you read this book you should keep the distinction well in mind, just in fairness to the Rovers, and really it is easy to distinguish. No Rover would ever have done what one Rollo does—puts his arms right around and makes love to Elsie Dinsmore!
Humor
MENDEL MARANTZ—David Freed- m&n—Langdon ($2). "What's a sweetheart? A dewdrop. What's a bride? A raindrop. What's a wife? A shower . . . a soldier . . . lightning . . . a dentist, she works on your nerves. . . . What's laziness — an invention, it saves work. . . . "
David Freedman seems to be a writer in whom the Pictorial Review thinks it has found a coming humorist. Definitions like the above pepper the inexhaustible conversation of his character, Mendel Marantz, philosophical loafer. The plot twists swiftly, unexpectedly: Mendel invents a dish, floor, and clothes-washing machine; gets rich, promises his wife a marble mansion, buys the tenement they inhabit instead; she leaves him, comes back to find the tenement transformed to a marble mansion, a resort for rich uptown Jews, who miss the smells, pickles and shirt-sleeves of their ghetto days. Mendel has a homely daughter. . . . Read it, if you have any liking at all for good Jew humor and mild philosophy.
Mild but Able
LODGERS IN LONDON — Adelaide Eden Phillpotts — Little, Brown ($2). The walls of lodging houses, in Bloomsbury or anywhere else, have certain demonstrable properties. They compress and usually depress any human life that comes to rest within them. They absorb the secrets of one chamber and exude them into all the other chambers. Yet the walls are not all that is active in a lodging house. No matter how dull human beings are, they react on one another individually. There will be love, jealousy, suspicion, etc. And it only takes one sprig of pepper to liven up a vegetable soup. Something like that is the thesis of this bit of still life in Bloomsbury. Miss Phillpotts, aged 30, studied sociology in college. Her ability to compose a narrative, to fashion small, heterogeneous and appealing characters, and to eke significance out of very minor situations, is doubtless due in part to her having Novelist Eden Phillpotts for father. It is mild but able.
—ADVENTURES OF A YOUNGER SON—Edward John Trelawny—Oxford University Press (World's Classics) ($.80).