Daughter's Discovery

THOSE FIRST AFFECTIONS--Dorothy Van Doren--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

When Sarah was six and lived in Brooklyn, her father was making a lot of money at the race tracks, wore fine brown suits, owned a good house. When Sarah was seven, her life was a nightmare of cheap boarding houses, lost toys, bewildering moves from hotels whose bills could not be met. By the time she was 14, her mother was working and her father sat at home struggling with vague inventions which never turned out right.

The third novel by Dorothy Van Doren, Those First Affections is the story of the father's decline & fall in Sarah's eyes-- from the time when there had been "nobody as big, or as funny, or sometimes as frightening," to the tragic day when he cried in her presence. Sarah had not known that men knew how to cry. She learned other things faster--economics by going hungry, the ways of boys from confidences of schoolmates. Before her father's death she learned her biggest lesson: "When you were a little child you thought your parents could do anything and knew everything. It was when you were growing up that you began to see them as people like other people, more kind, more tender, but not more wise, not always more capable. And because you saw them thus, curiously enough you became more fond of them. ..." Simply written and often moving, Those First Affections gives the impression that Sarah's father was unlucky in everything but his owlish, tactful, kind-hearted daughter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.