Florida Scrub

SOUTH MOON UNDER--Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings--Scribner ($2).

Florida tourists, viewing the Florida scrub from an Oklawaha River steamer, find it picturesque but not enticing. Even most Florida crackers think the scrub too bewilderingly wild to live in. But this impenetrable-seeming wilderness of pine and sand was just suited to Lantry Jacklin's taste. Onetime moonshiner in Ca'lina, he had killed a revenue man and fled to Florida; the scrub seemed the safest place he could find.

Young Lant, Jacklin's youngest son, shot up like an indigenous growth. When the rest of the children married and moved away, with old Lant dead, the youngster stepped easily into his daddy's shoes. For a while he made a good living for his mother and himself by hunting and fishing. Then hard times came. Lant salvaged and rafted cypress logs down to the sawmill; when there were no more to salvage he made the supreme sacrifice of trying to get a job in a mill. But he was just as pleased when there were no jobs to be had: he would rather have starved in the scrub than eat heartily in a town. Meantime his worthless cousin Cleve had married Kezzy, who would much rather have married Lant, but he would never look her way. Instead he courted a little doll from across the river, saw through her just in time. When there was no other way out, Lant took to moonshining, and was making out well until Cleve turned informer and his still was burned. With good cause but without meaning to, Lanfc shot Cleve. Though she had been Cleve's wife and borne him children, Kezzy still loved Lant best, was glad she could marry him at last. And like his old man before him, Lant went on living in the scrub, with fear at his elbow.

The Author, no Florida cracker, worked with her husband at journalism, publicity, advertising in the North. She has lived in Florida less than five years but thinks she is now settled for life. "If there is anything more glamorous than a Florida river I have yet to find it." Now (34), she has tried to be a writer for 24 years. Her first real encouragement came two years ago, when Scribner's printed her long short story "Jacob's Ladder." South Moon Under, with George Bernard Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God (TIME, Feb. 27), is the March choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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