Honor Them, Then

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. 1936. First Edition. Hardcover. [solid copy, light dust-soiling and minor spotting to top edge, minor bump to bottom rear corner, scar/remnant on front pastedown from mostly-removed bookplate or label, small rubber-stamped bookseller's name at bottom of front pastedown; jacket a bit edgeworn, spine slightly toned, minor paper loss at top of spine, small tear at top front corner]. "A first novel of savage strength" set against a Cape Cod background, this is a tale of a daughter who worships her mother but remains oblivious to the latter's insane jealousy and religious fanaticism, and its destructive effects on the family. The mother is a cranberry-picker's wife whose passionate desperation to maintain her hold on the girl leads her to "poison [her] mind against her father," which inadvertently "drives the child she loves into tragedy and smashes the pattern of her own life." Heavy stuff, this "penetrating study in the darker recesses of human motives" -- makes you kind of wonder about the home life of the author. As one contemporary critic noted, "the average reader likes to be entertained, not horrified. [The characters'] lives are filled with bitterness, hate, suspicion, despair, grinding toil, anger, frustration, and so on." In the words of another critic: "Adept telling alone saves it from being a literary nightmare." Interestingly, the jacket blurb: (a) gives no information whatsoever about the author; (b) omits the rather important fact that the family are immigrants from Finland; and (c) makes no reference to three other family members, two sons and another daughter. The author herself also seems to have been given zilch in the way of personal publicity by the publishers, and "Eve Walters" -- if that really was her name -- was never been heard from again. (All of which makes me even MORE curious about the well from which sprang this very intense novel.) .