“So farcical a plot demands a light and humorous touch and here the author fails, for though he gets amusing situations, the treatment of them is poor, and the dialogue is conspicuously without humor.”
– Acad. 71: 526. N. 24, ’06. 210w. – Ath. 1906, 2: 614. N. 17. 150w.
Macdonald, Ronald. Sea-maid. †$1.50. Holt.
Once upon a time the Dean of Beckminster and his prim wife were cast shipwrecked upon a lone sea island, and when after twenty years a certain ship’s company were marooned upon the same island they found, with the Dean and his wife, their beautiful daughter who dressed in savage garb and was eager to know of a world she had never seen. This is the setting of a veritable farce-comedy enacted by an English lord, a commonplace person with whom he has changed names to avoid the advances of a passée fortune hunter, the ship’s doctor, a girl who is “good sort,” an actor, and several other people both good and bad. The book is frankly intended to “draw smile and laugh.”
“There is somethings deliciously attractive in the serious manner in which he handles the subject.”
+ Acad. 70: 205. Mr. 3, ’06. 310w. + Ath. 1906, 1: 294. Mr. 10. 280w.
“An uneven book, genuinely amusing in parts, distinctly tiresome elsewhere.” Frederic Taber Cooper.
+ – Bookm. 23: 285. My. ’05. 270w.
“Of its kind ‘The sea-maid’ is good.”