Doctor's Difficulties

MY BROTHER JONATHAN--Francis Brett Young--Knopf ($3.00).

Mr. Dakers was by way of being a poet; Mrs. Dakers, years before, something of a Shakespearean actress. And so it happened that their adolescent boys were made to wear painfully purple velvet costumes at their first "children's party." But so well did they play cricket that they lived down the velvets. Harold careered brilliantly at Cambridge (financed on his brother Jonathan's small inheritance) while his brother Jonathan worked his way through the local medical school. Both brothers loved elfin yet extremely modern Edie--Harold blithely, Jonathan desperately. Came the War with a smart uniform for Harold, a curt injunction that Jonathan continue as invaluable village doctor. His constant helpmeet was Rachel, dark-eyed beauty, but he kept reminding himself that calm brunettes were not his type --too unlike Edie. These contemplations were rudely interrupted by Harold reported killed and Edie marrying disillusioned "brother Jonathan," that she might honorably bear Harold's child. Harold's unexpected reappearance so confuses the situation that nothing is left for the author but to let Jonathan fall ill and die, clinging to the hand of Rachel.

The melodramatic finale is out of key with a long leisurely narrative, packed as it is with rhapsodies on the Severn ("Sabrina Fair"), characterizations of local gentry, exposition of the difficulties and triumphs of a doctor's career.