Smalltown

THE BRIDE'S HOUSE--Dawn Powell-- ;Brentano ($2.50).

This is a book of women: a pair of spinsters, puttering and snickering into their neighbors' affairs; a country school teacher, sparse and feline, who soured with envy and wrecked a petty vengeance; Grandma Truelove who dozed in her chair, scorning the eternal sewing and child-bearing of women; Cecily, her daughter-in-law, a wiry little soul so neat of body and mind that she dreaded the thought of Aunt Lotta Truelove, a creature of passions who had had three husbands and as many children but neglected them all for theosophy. Specifically, Cecily hated Lotta because Sophie, daughter of the house, was undeniably like her aunt--beautiful Sophie who wondered and waited and watched for her particular destiny.

That destiny she saw at last in the cold blue eyes of Lynn Hamilton, a personable youth who had returned from the outside world to his Ohio farm. Quietly they planned a marriage which Sophie contemplated as a cure to her restlessness. But the black-eyed prodigal, son of the village doctor, thundered past her white bride's house on swift racing horses and lured her. And Sophie, hesitating, wondering, hoping he might have the answer Lynn had failed to give, staggered out to him in the stormy night, escaped with him to the great outside. Yet even in the escaping she knew that some day she would come back to the white safety of Lynn and his house.

Taut suspense snaps at the very end when Sophie succumbs to the inevitable. It is a sturdy smalltown story, lightly, tensely, skillfully told.