“Miss Delafield presents her characters through their own words, and their speech is sustained self-revelation. Almost all of them are eccentric, and their eccentricities are expressed with something of Dickens’s inventiveness and humorous exaggeration. We have to smile or laugh whenever they open their mouths.”
+ − The Times [London] Lit Sup p401 Je 24 ’20 660w
DELL, ETHEL MAY. Tidal wave, and other stories. *$1.75 (2c) Putnam
19–5814
The first of this collection of short stories tells of the love of a big red-headed young giant of a fisherman for a lovely vision of a girl whose awakening to womanhood came to her in an overpowering passion for an artist. The latter’s love was for his art to which he would have unscrupulously sacrificed the girl. A catastrophe which would have cost them both their lives but for the timely intervention of the red giant, taught the girl through much sorrow the difference between the love that stands like a rock and the passion that sweeps by like a tidal wave. The stories of the collection are: The tidal wave; The magic circle; The looker-on; The second fiddle; The woman of his dream; The return game.
“Six tales with well drawn characters which rather compensate for the melodramatic features of the book.”
+ − Booklist 16:312 Je ’20
“Of the six short stories contained in this volume, ‘The looker-on’ is perhaps the least stereotyped.”
+ − N Y Times 25:4 Mr 7 ’20 300w