RECENT BOOKS.
Johnny’s Vacations and Other Stories. By Mary E. N. Hathaway. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. $1.00.
Few more entertaining stories for small boys have lately made their appearance than Johnny’s Vacations. The author seems to have had experience with boys and tells in a charmingly natural manner the story of a vacation spent on a farm by one of them, Johnny Stephens by name. In addition there are six shorter stories, in which the girls will be as deeply interested as the boys. Among them are “The Doll’s Party,” “Biddy and her Chickens,” “The Wild Goose,” and “Pansy’s Visit.”
Royal Lowrie. A Boy’s Book. By Magnus Merriweather. D. Lothrop & Co., Boston. With eleven illustrations by Hopkins. 16mo. Price, $1.25.
Despite the efforts of publishers, a brilliant book for boys is a rara avis; therefore “Royal Lowrie” is likely to be appreciated by all lively boys between twelve and forty. While in literary finish the book ranks with the best novels of the day, the characters are the boys and girls of our modern High Schools. The plot is of breathless interest, but of such a character that we will warrant when the general mystification is dispersed no reader will feel like ever undertaking to seem what he is not. The humiliation which at last overtakes Royal Lowrie and Archer Bishop is so very thorough that the two gay, thoughtless fellows, in the language of the American Bookseller, “resolve in future to be wholly true, even in little things. Royal Lowrie is an especially engaging rattlepate, and we do not wonder that he wins forgiveness on all sides.”
Although it is an irresistibly humorous story of high-spirited boys and girls, the book is calculated to exert as strong a restraining influence as any volume which will be found in our Sunday-school Libraries.
ENTERPRISE.
We copy the following from The American Bookseller, New York:
Few people can have failed to notice the great enterprise, if they have not observed the scrupulous care with which Messrs. D. Lothrop & Co. have published a class of books adapted to the highest culture of the people.