“Susan is frankly a phenomenal child. After her stupid, bestial father murders the woman with whom he is living, Susan is adopted by a wealthy and cultured bachelor, and grows up to be a brilliant woman who holds her own in his circle of scholarly and fashionable friends.” (Outlook) “She is now old enough to be in love with [her] guardian, who is, of course, in love with her. But Ambo’s two special friends, a Yale professor and a New York radical, also love Susan. Finally it takes a bomb from a Gotha in the streets of Paris to bring Susan to the point of letting Ambo know that she loves him alone.” (Bookman)
“The reason why one reader is unimpressed by this plot, and even finds it absurd, is because he is unimpressed by Susan. She is over-clever, over-sprightly. So, for that matter, is the whole book.” H. W. Boynton
− Bookm 52:68 S ’20 500w
“For all its Stevensonesque touches, for all the moments when one glimpses a mind like Pater’s, or a glimmer of Ibsen, through the palings of the back fence, as it were, one has nothing, except a couple of characters—say five—to take away with one. The first part of the story is delightful.”
+ − Boston Transcript p6 Ag 7 ’20 430w
“The book is much above the average novel, and the author’s insight into feminine psychology quite remarkable. Moreover, it has the great quality of interest.”
+ Lit D p114 N 6 ’20 1650w
“Mr Dodd’s style is in another world from the gritty slovenliness of the average story; the earlier part of his book is filled with ripe and intense characterizations; the interpolated passages of criticism and verse are mellow and delightful. But the fable of the book is the fable of ‘Daddy Longlegs,’ not only in fact but, beneath all appearances of intellectual subtlety and integrity, in tendency and spirit. We can only hope that Mr Dodd will soon give us another novel in which his grace of style and temper shall serve to express an austerer strain of thought and imagination—austerer because it is truer and truer because it does not compromise.”
+ − Nation 111:329 S 18 ’20 620w