MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR

An outstanding group of short stories by an English writer sails into the world of fantasy and there displays the workings of a mind with rich and well schooled imaginative capacities. Several of the stories are peopled with the members of a particular family and typical of these is the ludicrous episode in which their mother finds herself when she and her ladies' club are taken on an excursion by the sailors for whom they have been knitting scarves. The rest, some almost as serious as the others were funny, are like fables yet each has an ingrained reality, polished to mirror life in its more acute and ironic moments. A studious doctor marries a gay girl and suffers from the magic pronouncement that she will disappear at the first impatient word he speaks to her. Because of her thoughtfulness a young child brings luck to her poor, hardworking mother though sickness and near tragedy must first intervene. Reading the first story is an enticing experience and one that demands reading the rest.