“Almost alone in a tired world, Miss Dell continues to sound the clarion note of melodrama. Taken by themselves Miss Dell’s heroes are rather tedious.”
− The Times [London] Lit Sup p385 Je 17 ’20 140w
DELL, FLOYD. Moon-calf. *$2.25 Knopf
20–19503
A biographical novel relating the childhood, adolescence and young manhood of Felix Fay. He was the youngest of a somewhat misfit family—his father’s early turbulence ending in failure and his brothers’ artistic proclivities in resigned adaptations to the necessities of life. Only in the dreamer Felix, because life was so unreal to him and his dreams so real, was there enough persistence to make some of the dreams materialize—after a fashion. The reader accompanies him through school life with its unquenchable thirst for reading, his religious development, his loneliness and poetic aspirations, his economic struggles and his acquaintance with socialism, his adolescent longings with their culmination in a love episode and his early career as a journalist.
“A subtle character study accomplished by narrated episodes rather than detailed analyses. Some readers will object to this on moral grounds. Probably not for the small library.”
+ Booklist 17:157 Ja ’21
Reviewed by R. C. Benchley
+ Bookm 52:559 F ’21 380w