Books: Again Jeremy

JEREMY AT CRALE—Hugh Walpole —Doran ($2). There are two categories into which this book might fall: the small and high-grade category of Hugh Walpole's previous writing or the large category of the Rollo Boys at Haddon Hall. Unfortunately it falls mostly into the second. Jeremy, who engrossed Mr. Walpole's attention quite frequently when he was small and individual, is now of schoolboy age and character. In his football playing, fighting, friendships, difficulties, he is no longer so engrossing, no longer individual. Here and there Author Walpole makes an opportunity to show his accustomed insight; always he manages with complete mastery a theme that many an inferior novelist has fumbled. But though his book is better than the run of schoolboy novels, it never quite loses the taint of sugary superficiality that has lingered in all such works since Eric, or Little by Little.