With trailing banners

In With Trailing Banners, (Little
Brown) Estelle Aubrey Brown
has written a powerful novel. It is
about a little Protestant girl born in
upstate New York about fifty years ago.
The town, originally Protestant, is inundated
by tides of incoming French
and Irish Catholics. The little girl
grows up in an atmosphere tense with
racial and religious conflict. She sees
the narrow-minded people of her own
sect reluctantly yielding ground to the
newcomers. She herself remains a
symbol of sanity and tolerance. As a
girl she makes friends with the daughter
of a French harlot and, because her
mother is too puritanical even to warn
her, she is almost led into childish sin.
Her mother is a timid religious woman
who is suspicious of her daughter's radiant
nature. The girl insists on changing
her name from Mary to Merry despite
her mother's grimaces. But her pagan
longing for happiness is starved until,
as a middle-aged Nora, she leaves her
brutal husband and son and goes "down
East." There is a sunny vitality about
this book that is heartening. It has an
intoxicating cleanliness and freshness
for all the sordidness of its subject.
Merry is a character that all of us
have dreamed of being and Mrs.
Brown has endowed her with a fiery
verisimilitude.